


Wolfsbane

by DiscontentedWinter



Series: Wolfsbane [1]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Deputy Stiles Stilinski, M/M, Psychological Torture, Sheriff Stilinski's Name is John, Stilinski Family Feels, Stockholm Syndrome, The warnings are for Kate and Derek's "relationship", Threats of Rape/Non-Con, Torture, deputy scott mccall
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-09
Updated: 2016-05-24
Packaged: 2018-06-07 09:34:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 17
Words: 48,231
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6798541
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DiscontentedWinter/pseuds/DiscontentedWinter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kate Argent has kept a little trophy of the Hale fire for all these years - Derek Hale.<br/>When Deputy Stiles Stilinski finds him, he doesn't just need to rescue Derek from the Argents. He needs to rescue Derek from his past.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This one is for @swlfangirl and @mishacollinsatemysoul
> 
> Because the angst. We need the angst.

 

“One, two, _three_ ,” Stiles says.

Scissors. Scott _always_ goes for scissors first. Always. So now, when he goes for paper, Stiles is shocked.

“Paper?” he exclaims, staring down at his own fist. “Oh, fuck you Scotty! Seriously?”

Scott uses Stiles’s rock-fist to fist bump him.

“Sorry, dude,” he says, and doesn’t sound sorry at all. “Guess I picked the right time to mix it up, yeah?”

“Fuck you,” Stiles sighs. “Fuck you sideways.”

“You wish, bro.”

Stiles grumbles and reaches for his hat, which is wedged on the dashboard.

“I’ll get the next one, okay?”

“Yeah,” Stiles mutters, and pushes the door of the cruiser open. “You owe me, asshole.”

They climb out of the cruiser, and Stiles pushes his irritation aside to make room for his game face. That highwire balance act between serious and sympathetic that he always worries he’s fucking up. Most people don’t notice his awkwardness though. Because the people he uses this face for generally don’t notice _anything_ , not once Stiles breaks the news to them.

Stiles loves almost all aspects of being a deputy. Okay, he’s only in his fourth month, and everything is still new and shiny and exciting. But he already hates delivering death messages, and he always will. On his first week in the job he got sent to a car crash on the highway with multiple fatalities, and yeah, it had been horrible, but at least Stiles had been kept busy doing stuff. With death messages, it’s different. Stiles is never sure if he overstays his welcome or not. He’s never sure when to excuse himself and leave. He’s never sure what to do when people won’t let go of his hand.

The house they’re approaching is a small one. A typical California bungalow. It’s well kept, with a neatly maintained lawn. An unremarkable house in an unremarkable street. Stiles notes a security camera on the porch, red light blinking at them as they approach. And the windows appear to have bars. Okay, so the homeowner is a little security conscious. Stiles isn’t in a position to judge. He knows he’s an idiot to sleep with his windows open. His dad’s been telling him so for years.

He checks the number on the door: 8.

8 Hastings Lane.

The address the dead woman had written on a piece of paper tucked inside the pocket of her jeans. An address, and a name, scrawled on a scrap of paper torn from a magazine. Stiles still shudders at the memory. They’d found the bottom half of the dead woman first. It had taken until the middle of the night for the dogs to sniff out her torso.

Hell of a night. He and Scott had been called in on overtime for the search. They hadn’t found the torso. They’d been up on a ridge a few miles from where she’d been found. Stiles had almost gotten caught in some sort of weird deer stampede, and then Scott had got bitten by something and totally freaked out. By the time Stiles had tracked him down again though, he’d been okay. His shirt had been soaked in blood, which was freaky, because Stiles couldn’t even find any puncture marks on him, even though Scott had sworn he’d felt a bite. The next morning he didn’t even have any bruising or anything.

Stiles kind of wishes that the half a dead woman in the woods had been the weirdest thing about that night.

The porch step creaks as they stand on it. Stiles sighs, and continued on to the front door. He presses the doorbell and hears the faint buzz somewhere inside. Then he knocks.

“Beacon Hills Sheriff’s Department,” he calls.

He and Scott both step to either side of the door.

That’s a habit ingrained in them now, one that the instructors at the academy pretty much beat into them. Stiles has noticed he’s started to do it even at friends’ houses on his days off. Knock, call out, and move aside. Just in case it’s not a warm welcome waiting.

It’s not a warm welcome at this house.

It’s no welcome at all.

Maybe there’s nobody home.

Stiles knocks again, and presses the doorbell again. “Beacon Hills Sheriff’s Department. Anyone home?”

It’s the middle of the day, so the occupants are probably at work. Stiles ran an address check back at the station before heading out. The house belongs to Kate Argent. No criminal record, but enough traffic violations to even put Stiles to shame. What? Before he was a cop he was a kid who thought _stop_ meant _stoptional_. He’s now an upstanding citizen. Totally.

“Dude,” he says in an undertone. “There’s nobody home.”

Which is great, because that way he and Scott will be able to head back to the station and flick this shitty job to the next shift. Stiles turns around to head back to the car.

“Did you hear that?” Scott asks.

Stiles turns back. “Hear what?”

“There’s someone in there,” Scott says, his forehead creased in a frown.

“Huh.” Stiles listens for a moment, but can’t hear a thing. “Must be those enhanced werewolf senses kicking in, Scotty.”

Scott rolls his eyes. “I am not a werewolf.”

Stiles shows him the palms of his hands. “Um, okay. So you got bitten by something badly enough that you were freaking out, and the next morning you’re miraculously better? How else do you explain it?”

“It wasn’t as bad as I thought, obviously,” Scott mutters.

“Dude, you thought you were _dying_.” It’s not that much of an exaggeration. Scott had asked Stiles to adopt Kylo. It had been serious.

Kylo is an evil cat that Stiles hates. But he’d promised, because Scott is his bro, and Kylo is the nephew he never wanted but would look after if he really, really had to.

“You’re letting your imagination run away with you.” Scott fixes him with a judgmental stare. “Remember that time you threw a slushie in Mr. Jorgenson’s face because you thought he was a monster?”

“Well, I didn’t have any holy water,” Stiles says. “And also I was eight, and he was speaking in a demon tongue.”

“He was having a stroke!” Scott’s shakes his head. “If Mom hadn’t been there, he might have died.”

“I think you’re underestimating the power of the slushie,” Stiles tells him.

Scott frowns, and he holds up his hand. He tilts his head. “There is definitely someone in there. I can hear breathing.”

“Really?” Stiles leans closer to the door. “I can’t hear shit.”

It’s Scott’s turn to bang on the door. “Beacon Hills Sheriff’s Department! Can you open the door, please?”

There’s no answer.

“Ugh.” Stiles steps off the porch and checks out the front of the house. He steps into a flower bed and crushes a bunch of what might be peonies under his boot. “Shit.”

Way to make a good impression.

_Mr. Hale. Mr. Derek Hale? I’m sorry to tell you that your sister is dead. Also, your peonies? My bad._

Stiles gets as close as he can without trampling too many more flowers to death, and shades his eyes as he peers in the window. Through a crack in the curtains he can see a glimpse of hardwood floors and a leather couch. He’s just about to call bullshit on Scott’s _‘I can hear breathing’_ when there’s a sudden flash of movement across Stiles’s narrow field of vision.

“Shit!” Stiles reels back in surprise, squashes _another_ bunch of innocent flowers, and then gets the hell out of the flowerbed before he tramples the entire thing.

“Yeah,” he says to Scott. “There is definitely someone in there.”

Scott presses the doorbell again, and gets the same result as the last six hundred times. Then he gives up and joins Stiles in front of the flowerbed. Then they head down the side of the house.

The gate squeaks.

“Are you getting a horror movie vibe?” Stiles asks in an undertone. “Because, Scotty, I’m getting a horror movie vibe.”

“Shut up,” Scott whispers back, looking worried. “It’s the middle of the day! Horror movie stuff doesn’t happen in the middle of the day.”

“Plot twist,” Stiles mutters.

They get their shit together again by the time they reach the back of the house. Because they are Serious Professionals.

“Beacon Hills Sherriff’s Department,” Scott says, rapping on what is probably the kitchen door.

Stiles squints in the window. There are bars in the frame, just like out the front, but the window itself is ajar. Stiles leans down so he can peer inside. He catches another glimpse of movement on the far side of the well-kept kitchen, in the doorway to the corridor.

“Hey,” he calls out. “Hey, are you okay in there?” He curls his fingers around the window frame. “My name’s Deputy Stilinski. My partner and I are looking for Derek Hale.”

He sees another flash of movement, and the light shifts in the hallway as though there’s someone standing right by the kitchen door.

“Hello?” he asks.

A pale face slowly appears around the kitchen doorjamb.

“Hey,” Stiles says. “”Are you Derek Hale?”

The guy steps warily into the kitchen.

Holy mother of the Abtronic 2000. The guy is _built_. He’s wearing nothing but a pair of sweatpants that hang loosely off his hips in all sort of interesting ways, and wow, not the time to be thinking that, because not only did Stiles crush his peonies, he’s about to crush his world. Also, there’s something really _off_ about the guy.

“Can you open the door, please?” Stiles asks. “Sir?”

The guy just stares at him.

Scott leans down beside Stiles. “Sir, I—” And then he coughs, and moves back rapidly.

“Scotty?” Stiles asks, worried. It’s been a few years since Scott’s had an asthma attack. The only reason he got into the academy was because everyone figured he’d grown out of them. But Stiles still remembers the symptoms with terror. Watching Scott struggle to breathe. Watching his face turn gray and his lips turn blue. “Scotty!”

Scott straightens up, waving away his concern. “It’s okay. But something smells really bad in there.”

Stiles sniffs the air carefully. Lemon Dawn?

“It’s Derek, isn’t it? Derek Hale?” Stiles asks the guy. “Can you open the door for me, Derek?”

The guy looks at the door, and then back at where Stiles is peering through the narrow gap in the window. “It’s locked.”

“Yeah,” Stiles agrees, wondering what’s up with this guy. “Can you unlock it?”

The guy shakes his head. “It’s locked. Kate locked it.”

“Yeah, dude, can you unlock it?” Stiles is trying hard not to lose his patience with this guy, but it’s a fucking struggle, right? Clearly the guy is not playing with a full deck.

“Kate has the key,” the guy says, his voice soft.

Scott’s rattling the kitchen door, and then he’s back beside Stiles again. “Stiles, I think that maybe he’s locked in!”

Stiles squints at the guy. “Are you locked in?”

The guy nods.

“Shit,” Stiles says. He straightens up again and raises his eyebrows at Scott. “Dude?”

“I _know_ , dude!” Scott is wide-eyed. “What if there’s like a _fire_ or something?”

Stiles hears a sudden sound from inside the kitchen. Like a whine or something. When he peers through the window again, the guy has vanished.

“We have to do something,” Stiles says. “Like, maybe he’s like mentally ill or he has developmental issues or something, but we can’t just leave him locked up here!”

“What should we do?” Scott asks, like they’re twelve years old again and trying to solve the Great Mystery of the Missing Peanut Butter Cups.

Spoiler alert: it was Stiles’s dad.

“Dude,” Stiles says, gesturing to his uniform. “We’re the _police_. We get to break in and get him out of there, right?”

“Right,” Scott says. “Because we have immediate concerns for his safety.”

Stiles’s first instinct is to call his dad. Not just because he’s his dad, but also because he’s the sheriff. And it seems like thinking of breaking into a citizen’s house is like something Stiles should maybe get authorization for? Particularly since he’s a rookie. And so is Scott. And they’re not even supposed to be working together, but since this murder the department has been really stretched, and all they had to do was—it morphs into his dad’s voice in Stiles’s head— _deliver a death message, Stiles, and how the_ hell _did that turn into a forced entry and an investigation into deprivation of liberty?_

And then he hears that faint whine again, and he knows he can’t wait. There is something very wrong here.

“Scotty,” he says. “Get the ax out of the trunk.”

Scott hurries to obey.

Stiles curls his fingers around the bars on the window and tugs against them pointlessly. It’s only then, when he’s looking out for Scott to get back, that he notices another security camera nestled under the eaves at the corner of the roof. Stiles raises his eyebrows at it, and resists the urge to flip it the bird.

Because he is a Serious Professional.

He grabs the ax off Scott when Scott gets back, and goes to town on the kitchen door.

Scott’s still complaining about the imaginary smell when Stiles smashes enough of the lock on the kitchen door to kick it open.

The house is clean. Spotless, in fact. Unnaturally so, in Stiles’s opinion. He’s never trusted anyone who doesn’t at least have one crumb-dusted plate in the sink. Who lives like that? Kate Argent and Derek Hale, apparently.

“Mr. Hale?” he calls out softly as he makes his way to the front of the house. “Mr. Hale, it’s Deputy Stilinski, remember? Like Sheriff Stilinski, only younger.”

That joke never fails to get a laugh around town, but it doesn’t even raise the hint of a giggle in this house.

The living room is empty. So is the dining room.

“Stiles!” Scott calls.

In another house, Stiles guesses, this room might by the second bedroom. Except there’s no bed, no wardrobe, no dresser, nothing. Just a mostly empty room with white walls, and a massive padlock on the door. The door is open though. And the man Stiles assumes is Derek Hale is waiting on his knees in the middle of the floor, with his hands clasped behind his neck.

“I didn’t leave,” he mutters to the floor. “I’m good, Kate. I didn’t leave.”

Something in the tone of his voice—so quiet, so desperate, so afraid—makes Stiles feel sick.

“Hey,” Scott says, and steps forward. He reaches out a hand to touch Derek Hale. “Are you—”

And suddenly Derek Hale straightens up, and his eyes flash _blue_ , and there are ears, and there is hair, and there are _fangs_ , and Stiles screeches in a totally manly way, and reaches out to grab Scott by the arm to get him the hell out of there.

Only to discover that Scott is a horror movie monster too.

“Holy _shit_!” All of Stiles’s training falls immediately into the screaming vortex of his panic and is scattered on the wind. What Stiles should do, of course, is draw his weapon and aim it steadily at the threat, and instruct him to get down on the floor with his hands behind his neck. Which—okay, that’s not going to work because Hale is already on the floor with his hands behind his neck, and also he’s not the only threat, because Scott. _Scott!_

Stiles flails backward, arms windmilling in his desperation to get away, and—because gravity has always been an asshole to Stiles—he manages to trip over thin air and end up lying on his back on the floor, blinking up at the ceiling and wondering if he’s dead yet.

When Derek Hale looms over him suddenly, Stiles squawks and shoves away. Not that there’s anything to shove against. Nothing except Derek’s Hale’s thankfully now non-monstrous torso. So Stiles shoves against that, and doesn’t move an inch.

But hey, apparently he’s _not_ dead.

“I’m sorry,” Derek Hale says, his voice deceptively soft. His face is human again. And fucking gorgeous, but that’s really beside the point. Actually, that’s not even beside the point. It’s in a different room and a different house than the point. Possibly even a different hemisphere.

“Wha—” Stiles manages.

Derek Hale shuffles back, still on his knees.

“Scotty?” Stiles asks, twisting his head to look up at Scott.

Scott is staring back down at him. He’s not hairy and fangy anymore either. He looks like the same guy Stiles has known for most of his life. Harmless, and kind of goofy, and the polar opposite of ball-twistingly terrifying.

“Scotty?” Stiles asks again.

“Dude,” Scott breathes. He looks pale, like he’s going to pass out. “I think I really am a werewolf!”


	2. Chapter 2

Scott is a werewolf.

That’s the thought that Stiles keeps coming back to, because, well, it’s a biggy. It’s the sort of thought that challenges Stiles’s entire belief system, because, okay, on one hand he totally called it, but on the other hand, last week when he couldn’t get cellphone reception for ten minutes in the middle of town he’d taken it as the first sign of civilization collapsing, and probably the zombie apocalypse. So Stiles kind of has a habit of going with the craziest theory, because life is so much more fun that way. It’s not like he expected to be _right_.

Because Scott is seriously a werewolf.

And Stiles is having a very hard time adjusting to this very new, very terrifying worldview that has been thrust upon him.

He finally manages to scoot back far enough to hit a wall, and uses it to kind of haul himself to his feet again. He needs this wall to stay upright. This wall is his life right now. Stiles clings to it like a gecko until he’s sure his knees won’t buckle the second he lets go.

“Holy shit,” he says to the wall. “Holy _shit_.”

He finally turns around.

Derek Hale is still kneeling on the floor. His hands are on his knees, his fingers twitching against the fabric of his sweatpants. Stiles stares at them, expecting to see claws. Then he drags his gaze to Scott. Scott is pale and shaking, one hand hovering over his Glock and the other over his Taser, like he doesn’t know which one he should grab, but feels he should be doing _something_.

“Scotty,” Stiles says, his throat clicking when he speaks. “You okay, Scotty?”

Scott fixes him with a wide, panicked stare. “Um…”

Right.

“Don’t shoot anyone though, okay?” Stiles says.

Scott looks down at what his hands are doing. He sucks in a shaky breath and shoves his hands behind his back.

Okay, so.

“Derek?” Stiles asks quietly. “Derek Hale?”

“I’m sorry,” Derek whispers, his gaze downcast. “I’m sorry, Kate. I’m being good. I’m not running. I’m being good.”

And the shudder of disquiet that runs down Stiles’s spine at hearing that has nothing to do with werewolves, and everything to do with the way Derek is begging forgiveness from someone who’s not even in the room.

Stiles looks around again. The room’s not entirely empty. There’s a thin mattress on the floor. It’s not even full sized. It’s more like… like a dog bed.

Stiles crouches down in front of Derek, heedless of Scott’s sharp intake of breath. “Derek,” he says carefully. “Derek, can you look at me for a second?”

Derek lifts his gaze.

“Is this your room?” Stiles asks. “Do you sleep in here?”

Derek nods, and drops his gaze again.

Well, _shit_.

Stiles reaches out slowly and touches his fingers to the back of Derek’s left hand. Derek flinches a little. His skin is warm to the touch. “Derek, are you being kept here against your will?”

“No,” Derek whispers. His eyes are amazing. Green, but flecked with colors Stiles can’t even name. A kaleidoscope of them. A galaxy. “I’m good. I stay because I’m good.”

Stiles has no idea what the hell is going on here, but something stinks.

Literally, apparently.

“Um, what is that _smell_?” Scott asks.

Stiles sniffs but he can’t smell anything.

“It’s like, it’s making me feel really weird, like kind of woozy,” Scott says. “We should call the fire department, and wait outside and—”

“No!” Derek’s eyes flash again, that terrifying blue color, and Stiles jerks back. “No. Inside. We have to stay inside, or Kate will get mad.”

Locks on the doors. A fucking dog bed. Someone who’ll get mad if he leaves. Derek might not be able to say it, but Stiles has absolutely no doubt he’s not here willingly. Not in any way that counts.

“Stiles,” Scott says. “I’m not kidding. I feel really sick. I think we should like go, and call this in, because whatever that is—”

“Wolfsbane,” Derek says, fixing his gaze on the floor again. “It’s wolfsbane.”

Stiles has spent a lot of time online, okay? He gets into strange research spirals and doesn’t come out again for days. So, wolfsbane. Monkshood. Aconitum. Call it whatever the hell you want, it comes down to the same thing: fucking poison.

Stiles drags his shirt up over his mouth. “Out,” he says to Scott. “Out!”

They race out through the kitchen, and into the sunlight and the fresh air.

“Holy shit,” Scott wheezes. “What the fuck is even going on?”

Stiles, still holding his shirt over his mouth, for whatever good it’ll do, peers in through the open kitchen door. “Derek?”

A moment later Derek appears again, lurking anxiously in the doorway between the kitchen and the hallway.

“Derek, come outside, please.” Stiles holds his free hand out toward him.

“It’s not poisonous to humans,” Derek tells him. “The wolfsbane. It’s a special strain.”

“But…” Stiles lets his shirt drop. “But you’re not human, are you, Derek? Come out of the house. You can come out, right? The sunlight won’t hurt you?”

“That’s vampires,” Scott reminds him.

“Well, how the hell do I know that for sure?” Stiles asks. “I’m not going to assume I know everything about werewolves just because I’ve seen a bunch of B-Grade movies!”

“Dude,” Scott reminds him. “I’m standing right here in the sunlight, and I’m not dead.”

“That is actually a really good point,” Stiles tells him. “Sorry. I think I still haven’t come to terms with the whole… _grrr_.” He makes claws with his fingers.

“Oh my god,” Scott says. “Am I really a fucking werewolf?”

Apparently Scott hasn’t come to terms with it either.

And now is probably not the time for an existential crisis. They need to sort out their priorities, and Stiles feels that one of those priorities should be getting Derek Hale out of an environment that is literally poisoning him.

Also, he should _really_ call his dad, because whatever is going on here is way above Stiles’s pay grade _and_ modest skill set. Although it’s probably way above his dad’s too, to be honest. The classes at the academy did not cover anything like this.

“Derek,” Stiles says. “Just come to the back door, okay? Just so we can talk? You don’t need to leave the house. You’re still being good.”

Derek pads warily across the kitchen floor. When he reaches the back door he lifts his face as though he’s smelling the fresh air for the first time. His eyes flash again, and he closes them briefly. When he opens them again they’re that astonishing green-and-everything-else color, and they seem even brighter than before. He curls his fingers around the doorjamb and seems to sway a little on his feet.

“Okay?” Stiles asks. It’s probably a dumb question, but Stiles needs to keep talking to him, to stop him retreating back into the house.

Derek blinks at him.

“Derek, I really need to know what’s going on here,” Stiles says. “With the locks and the wolfsbane and stuff. Can you tell me what that’s all about?”

“It’s to stop me from shifting,” Derek says softly. “To keep me from being bad.” He frowns in Scott’s direction. “You made me shift!”

“I didn’t mean to!” Scott exclaims.

“Okay, it doesn’t matter,” Stiles says. “Is it bad when you shift, Derek? Like, um, do you attack the villagers and stuff?”

Derek’s eyebrows do something expressive. Stiles thinks they’re calling him an idiot.

“I’m really new to all this, dude,” he says, the breath rushing out of him. “Like, I’ve known werewolves are real for about ten minutes now. This is a hell of a learning curve.”

“Shifting is bad,” Derek says, his face a mask again.

“Why though?” Stiles presses. “Is it dangerous?”

“It’s _bad_ ,” Derek repeats.

It’s like having an argument with a five-year-old. Some stubborn little bastard who wants candy _now_ and refuses to see reason. Stiles hasn’t actually had much experience arguing with five-year-olds, but he definitely remembers being one and giving his parents, neighbors, family friends and increasingly hysterical babysitters absolute hell.

“Okay,” Stiles agrees. “Shifting is bad. Derek, um…”

Holy shit.

He can’t do this. There is way too much else going on right now for Stiles to get back on track with the whole reason they came here in the first place. Because what then? They’re supposed to turn around and walk away and leave him here? When he’s locked in a poisonous house? When the specter of some scary woman is hanging over the place? When he’s a _werewolf_? Like, seriously, what the fuck is Stiles supposed to do right now?

Derek is staring at him warily.

“Derek.” Stiles clears his throat. “I’m really sorry, but the reason we’re here is because we’re got bad news.”

Something shutters in Derek’s expression. Something that makes Stiles think that Derek Hale has already taken too many hits, and here he is bracing for another one. He doesn’t look frantic, like most people do. He doesn’t look like he’s clinging to impossible hope, like they have the wrong house, the wrong person, the wrong fucking tragedy. He looks resigned.

And Stiles knows about the Hales. He didn’t think there were any left living in Beacon Hills after the fire years ago. The entire family had burned when their house did. Well, all of them except for Laura, who left town, and for Peter, who… Last Stiles heard Peter Hale was still in a coma. And Derek. Nobody was ever really sure what had happened to him.

“Two nights ago the body of a woman was found in the Beacon Hills Preserve,” Stiles says. “We believe that it’s Laura Hale, your sister.”

Watching someone crumble into grief is the worst thing Stiles has ever had to do. Derek’s grief isn’t expressive, but Stiles can still see the moment it hits him and he sags as though it’s physically dragging him down. His fingers go white where they’re clutching the doorjamb. He clenches his jaw. He doesn’t make a sound, but when he blinks tears slide down his cheeks.

“I’m very sorry for your loss,” Stiles tells him, and reaches out and puts a hand on his shoulder.

When Stiles’s mom died, one of their neighbors said, _“She’s in a better place now.”_ Which, bullshit, because Stiles is and pretty much always has been an atheist. His parents let him stop going to Sunday School when he started asking too many difficult questions. They weren’t believers themselves, but they’d been hoping to socialize their awkward little monster by sending him there, despite the happy-clappy bullshit that went along with the classes. So when, years later, the neighbor has said Claudia Stilinski was in a better place, Stiles hadn’t been angry or anything, even though he knew his mom wasn’t anywhere except _gone_. Instead he’d been envious of their neighbor for believing that, for being able to actually take comfort in her unassailable faith. Stiles wished then, and he wishes now, that he could believe the same thing.

“Laura,” Derek whispers.

“I’m so sorry,” Stiles says again, and wishes it were _more_. “Derek, we think it’s her, okay, but we need you to identify her. I wouldn’t ask you to do it unless we were already pretty sure, but—”

“It’s her,” Derek says, closing his eyes and swaying a little. He sucks in another lungful of fresh air. “I didn’t… I didn’t feel it before, but it’s her.”

Derek lurches forward suddenly, into the sunlight, and Stiles barely has time to get the hell out of his way before Derek’s on the ground, painting the back path with some sort of inky vomit that would do Jackson Pollock proud, had Jackson Pollock been emo. And suffering a really bad stomach flu.

“Derek? Hey?” Stiles is hesitant to touch him, because _werewolf_ , but since when has Stiles been ruled by common sense, or even self-preservation? Since never. Ask his dad. Hell, ask anyone. He reaches out and puts a hand on Derek’s shoulder again, digging his fingers in a little when Derek doesn’t wrench away. “Shit, are you _okay_?”

Clearly he’s not. He’s on his hands and knees, and he keeps coughing, and there’s black _stuff_ everywhere.

“Should we call an ambulance?” Scott asks.

“And tell them what?” Stiles shoots back, fighting down the crazy urge to laugh. “That we’ve got a sick _werewolf_?”

Derek, on his hands and knees between them, retches again, but this time he doesn’t vomit. He sucks in a few deep, shuddering breaths, and then seems to fold down into himself. Stiles keeps one hand on his shoulder still, gaze drawn to the tattoo on Derek’s back. It’s some sort of circular spiral pattern. It looks like it might be Celtic. It shines against Derek’s sweat-slick skin, and seems to ripple a little as Derek’s muscles bunch and shift under his skin.

“Derek,” Stiles says. He still really has no idea what the hell is going on here, but he knows it’s not good, and he knows he needs to get Derek away. “You need to come with us, okay?”

Derek murmurs something under his breath that sounds like a negative.

“No, because you need to help us identify Laura’s body, remember?” Stiles tells him. “I’m really sorry, but you have to do that. And after that we can figure everything else out.”

Like why Derek’s been living with a woman who treats him like a dog, and poisons his air.

Derek’s gaze is still fixed on the ground. He shakes his head.

Well, if Derek won’t listen to Stiles, maybe he’ll listen to another werewolf?

Stiles catches Scott’s gaze. Makes claws with his spare hand.

Scott’s eyebrows shoot up, and his jaw drops.

Stiles gives a silent, exaggerated growl.

Scott meeps.

 _Do it,_ Stiles hopes his glare tells Scott, _or I’ll tell_ _your mom every secret I’ve kept from her since we were kids. Including what really happened to that vase she liked._ And _what sort of porn you watch._

Scott is kind of a sweetheart. He once had an existential crisis because he got off on this video where the porn actress was playing a nurse. And Scott’s mom is a nurse. Scott doesn’t over-think much except, for some weird reason, porn. Stiles, obviously, has developed the healthy denial that has enabled him to get off on guys dressed as cops since he was a teenager. He’s never worried that it means he’s secretly attracted to his own dad. Or, now, himself, and every single one of his colleagues. Then again, Stiles has also never worried that his perfectly legitimate thing for daddy kink has anything to do with his actual father.

Scott folds. Of course he does.

“Derek,” he says, stepping forward. “Stiles is right. You’re going to come with us.”

Derek looks up at him sharply. “No…”

“Yes,” Scott says firmly, and wow, his eyes flash gold. They flash. _Gold_. It’s kind of incredible.

And then Stiles realizes that Derek’s vibrating a little, and a low noise rumbles out of him, and oh, okay, that’s a growl. Stiles lets go of his shoulder and takes a few steps back.

Whatever supernatural pissing match Scott and Derek are in, Stiles thinks Scott is winning. Derek’s eyes flash blue a few times, and he’s growling, but his posture is defensive, and he’s still hunched over on the ground.

“You’re coming with us,” Scott says, his voice still firm. “Come on. Stand up.”

Derek obeys, whatever fight was in him immediately draining away again. His shoulders are slumped, his gaze downcast. He stands there like he’s trying to make himself look smaller.

“Okay,” Stiles says. “Okay, that’s good. Let’s get—”

And suddenly Derek whines, and flinches away, and dives back inside the kitchen door. Stiles starts to follow, then catches himself at the back door and turns around to look at Scott.

“You can’t come in, can you?” Stiles says.

“It smells really bad,” Scott says, frowning worriedly.

“Okay,” Stiles says, pinching the bridge of his nose. “How about this? You go and get my dad, and bring him here? And I’ll stay with Derek in the meantime, and make sure he’s okay.”

Scott gestures to his radio.

“No, dude,” Stiles says. “I think like we should try and keep this between us for now, right? Just get my dad here?”

“Okay,” Scott says. “Be safe, okay?”

“That’s the plan,” Stiles says, taking a deep breath before venturing back into the house.

Scott heads for the front yard again. The red light on the security camera blinks as he rounds the corner of the house.

 


	3. Chapter 3

Derek isn’t in the kitchen. Stiles heads for the near-empty room again, but Derek’s not there either.

“Derek?” he calls. “Where are you?” He starts to check the other rooms.

Okay, so the whole world is crazy now and makes no sense, but Stiles is certain of one thing: Derek Hale needs someone in his corner right now, however fucking insane that corner is. He’s not _right_ , and Stiles is sure it’s more psychological than supernatural.

“Where are you, Derek?” he asks, and is unsurprised when he gets no answer.

Jesus. This is a nightmare. Stiles is a quick thinker, okay? He’s an epic problem-solver, which is the direct result of being an epic problem-maker, but that’s beside the point. Stiles, on a good day, could give Machiavelli a damn good run for his money. And he has nothing. _Nothing_. He knows he has to take Derek to identify his sister’s body, so that’s what he tries to focus on for now. He needs to get Derek out of here, and cleaned up, and dressed in more than sweatpants, and a pair of shoes would go a long way to making him look human, but after that? After that Stiles is back to nothing. He only knows he can’t return Derek to this house, and to _Kate_. He’s sure of that. But he’s totally freaking out about the things he doesn’t know. Like how Derek ended up here in the first place. Like is he dangerous? What if Kate Argent has been keeping him weak and sick so he doesn’t turn into a blood crazed killing machine? Is that possible? Stiles doesn’t know. And Stiles _hates_ it when he doesn’t know things because yes, his ego is that fragile.

Stiles finds Derek in the living room. He’s kneeling on the floor beside the couch. For a guy with his impressively muscular build, he looks very, very small, and Stiles feels a pang of pity for him.

“Derek?”

Derek doesn’t look up at him.

“Derek.”

Shit. Stiles has no idea what to do, apart from crouch down beside Derek and curl his fingers over his shoulder. He knows what it’s like to feel loss that’s bone deep. It’s been years, but it never goes away. Some part of Stiles will always be eight-years-old, howling at a loss so profound it’s shaped every part of his life since. And he relives it, every time he has to tell someone that a family member has passed away. It never stops hurting, although the raw pain has transformed into a dull ache over the years.

“It’s okay,” he says to Derek, swallowing around the lump in his throat. “My dad’s coming. He’ll figure out what to do.”

Too late Stiles hears the clip of boot heels on the hardwood floors. He twists around, already off balance as he stands.

There’s a woman standing in the doorway to the living room. She’s got a smirk on her face and a gun pointed right at him.

“Oh, sweetie,” she says. “By the time your daddy gets here, you’ll be long gone.”

Kate.

It can only be Kate Argent.

“Drop your weapon,” Stiles says woodenly, which is a really fucking dumb thing to say when his hand is nowhere near his Glock.

Kate cocks an eyebrow. “Look at you. You’re all shiny and brand new, aren’t you, cutie pie? Here’s how this is going to go. You’re going to unbuckle your gun belt, and you’re going to drop it on the floor and kick it over toward me. And you’re going to do this by the time I count to three because, if you don’t, I’m going to put a bullet in your skull. One…”

Stiles has no doubt that she means it. He unhooks his radio from his epaulette. Fumbles with his belt. His shaking fingers refuse to co-operate.

“Two,” Kate says.

Stiles wrenches his belt open, and drops it to the floor. His radio, his gun, his baton, his capsicum spray, his Taser. He kicks them toward her.

“Good boy,” Kate says. She bends down to scoop his belt up without breaking eye contact for even a second. She slings his belt over her shoulder, and her smile grows.

That’s when Stiles knows she’s going to shoot him anyway.

“Please,” he says, his voice rasping.

His dad. His dad is coming here, and he can’t walk in on something like that. On his kid’s blood and brain matter splattering the walls. He can’t.

Stiles blinks, and hot tears run down his face.

 _Dad_.

And suddenly Derek has uncurled himself from the floor, and he’s standing in front of Stiles, chest heaving. Over his shoulder, Stiles sees Kate hesitate for a moment, before she smiles again.

“Aw, did Derek make a friend?” Kate asks. “You want to keep him around to play for a while, sweetie?”

Derek makes a noise somewhere between a whine and a growl.

Kate rolls her eyes, and unhooks Stiles’s handcuffs from his belt. “Put these on your little chew toy, sweetie.”

Derek turns Stiles around, and circles his wrists with his warm fingers first, and then the handcuffs. Stiles shivers as they lock in place.

“Go and get a pillow case,” Kate says.

Derek casts a long look at Stiles as he leaves.

Kate sets her gun and Stiles’s belt down out of reach, and approaches him. She grabs his chin in her hands, and tilts his head on an angle. “Breaking into my house. Teaching my puppy to be bad. A bullet’s too good for you.” She tightens her grip on his chin, nails digging in. “What did you come here for?”

“A death message,” Stiles rasps.

“Who’s dead?” Kate’s eyes narrow.

“Laura. Laura Hale.”

Kate raises her eyebrows. “Good. What’s one more dead dog?”

She’s… she’s a psychopath, probably. Stiles isn’t usually one to make snap decisions about another person’s psychological profile, but he’s willing to make the exception for Kate Argent. She’s got him cuffed and helpless, and she’s going to kill him, and she’s smiling like she’s enjoying a day at the fucking zoo.

“My father is the sheriff,” he tells her.

Her smile grows. She releases his chin and tears his name badge off his shirt. “Stilinski. Not a common name, is it?”

Not in Beacon Hills, at least.

Kate flicks his badge open so the long pin is protruding. Then, before Stiles can even react, she stabs it into his cheek and drags it downward, tearing the skin open. Stiles cries out and tries to flinch away, but Kate grabs him by the hair and forces him still. Then she shoves his badge against his cheek, using it to scrape up the blood.

“There,” she says, pulling the badge back at last to show him. _Stilinski_ , with blood smeared all over it. She tosses the badge onto the leather couch. “That’ll make a nice present for daddy, won’t it?”

Stiles stares over her shoulder at Derek.

Derek inches into the room. He doesn’t look at Stiles. He’s clutching a dark green pillowcase. He holds it out toward Kate.

Kate smiles at Stiles brightly. “Say goodnight, cutie pie.”

She pulls the pillowcase over his head, and Stiles is blind.

 

***

 

The combination of the hood over his head, the enclosed space of the trunk of the car, and Stiles’s panic attack make it impossible to breathe. He knows he needs to stay awake. Knows he needs to try and gauge the length of time they’re traveling, listen for any sounds that will give him some hint of where they are: road works, traffic volume, _anything_. But he can’t. He can’t _breathe_ , and there are werewolves, and crazy gun-toting psychopaths, and his badge with blood on it, and his dad is going to be so fucking scared for him, and it’s all too much.

Stiles blacks out.

 

***

 

Stiles blinks into consciousness slowly. He’s lying on a cold concrete floor. A basement? His hands are still cuffed behind his back, and there’s a warm hand resting on his shoulder.

Stiles sucks in a breath, and almost chokes on it. The hand on his shoulder is withdrawn abruptly, and Stiles flops like a landed fish until he can actually sort of push himself up so he’s leaning with his back against the wall instead of the floor.

Yeah, it’s a basement. Probably. It’s a concrete room, with a single flickering bulb providing hardly any light at all. There’s one door. It looks metal. There’s no furniture. There’s a bucket in the one corner. And, across from Stiles, there are iron rings drilled into the concrete walls, with chains looped through them like tinsel. Why the hell does Stiles look at them, and imagine himself hanging there? Because he’s seen way too many horror movies, probably.

Stiles turns his head to look at Derek.

Derek shuffles away from him, and settles in the opposite corner of the room. He regards Stiles warily.

“Don’t even fucking look at me,” Stiles mutters, remembering exactly whose hands locked the cuffs on him, who brought Kate the pillowcase hood. His anger is short-lived, because of course then he remembers how broken Derek is, but how he stood in front of him when Kate was going to shoot him. “Hey.”

Derek hunches over.

Stiles sighs. “I’m sorry, Derek. I didn’t mean that.”

He is sorry, but he’s also practical. Derek is the closest thing to an ally he’s got in this situation, and clearly he’s got more freedom than Stiles does. Stiles won’t call it choice, because he had a feeling that any freedom Derek is allowed has been at the expense of every last piece of autonomy he’s ever had. But still, Derek doesn’t have cuffs, and Kate clearly trusts he won’t turn against her. It’s not much, but it’s all Stiles has got to work with, right?

“Do you know where we are, Derek?”

Derek stares at him for a long moment before he answers. “A safe house.”

Well, that’s a matter of opinion since Stiles has never felt less safe in his entire life, but he lets it slide.

“Where though?” Stiles asks, and Derek only shrugs. Stiles isn’t sure if he doesn’t know, or if it just doesn’t matter to him.

Stiles sinks into silence.

 

***

 

Hours pass, and it gets colder. Stiles is thirsty, and hungry. He hurts. He shifts positions several times to try and get more comfortable. He ends up lying on the floor, cheek pressed against the concrete while he tries not to have another panic attack. He wants to go home.

With his first paycheck from the Beacon Hill’s Sheriff’s Department, Scott had paid a rental deposit on an apartment in a slightly run-down complex near the station. But then, as Stiles had pointed out, pretty much everything in Beacon Hills is slightly run down. Not in a bad way, exactly, but in the same way as a comfortable pair of sneakers. By the time they feel just right, they’re not shiny and new anymore.

With his first paycheck from the Beacon Hill’s Sheriff’s Department, Stiles had bought Batman #94, from September 1955. Because adult priorities are for other people, that’s why. So every night when Scott goes home to his apartment and his evil cat, Stiles goes home to his dad’s place, and sleeps under the same patch of ceiling he has since the day he was born. And he refuses to feel bad about it, because he likes living with his dad, okay? Most of the time they’re on different shifts anyway, so it’s not like his dad still treats him like a kid and reminds him to brush his teeth every night or whatever. Okay, fine. He still does, but Stiles is an adult and can choose to ignore him and get cavities if he wants.

He wants to go home. He misses his dad desperately, not just because it’s been hours but because he knows his dad will be frantic with worry. He wants to eat dinner across from his dad at their little kitchen table, because they never use the dining room except for holidays and other special occasions. He wants his dad to grumble about the latest vegetarian recipe Stiles is forcing him to try, and then eat it anyway and reluctantly admit it’s not too bad.

He hurts. His shoulders ache because his hands are still cuffed, and he can’t feel his fingers. There’s too much pressure on his chest, and he can only breathe shallowly. Laying face down on the floor might take the weight off his aching shoulders and back, but Stiles knows it’s far more dangerous than it appears. He’s the poster boy for positional asphyxia.

“Derek?” he rasps. “I need to stand up.”

Derek is by his side immediately, hooking his warm hands under Stiles’s arms and helping him to his feet. Stiles sways, dizzy. The sudden shift in position makes it easier to breathe, but it also fucking burns across his shoulders, and deep into his back. He worries that he’s torn his rotator cuffs. And then he remembers he’s got a lot more to worry about than that.

Derek’s warm, and Stiles leans against him. He rests his head on his shoulder, closing his eyes, and Derek puts one hand on the nape of his neck, and the other over his cuffed hands. Yeah, he’s warm, because it’s like he’s pressing a hot water bottle against Stiles’s protesting muscles. The pain actually bleeds away. For the first time in hours Stiles doesn’t hurt.

Derek makes a sound like a pleased rumble, and Stiles suddenly realizes that they’re pretty much _cuddling_.

He straightens up and steps away from Derek quickly, because no. He’s a deputy, which means he’s a trained professional and whatnot. Sharing warmth is one thing, particularly when Derek seems to have plenty to go around, but near-cuddling? No. No, because Stiles needs to stay in control here, needs to stay focused, and needs to start working on a way to get himself out of this mess.

Except right in this moment Stiles doesn’t feel like a deputy. He doesn’t feel like he’s in control. He feels like he’s a twenty-year-old kid who’s way out of his depth, and really, really needs his dad.

Stiles walks to the wall and leans his forehead against it. He tries to roll his shoulders, but it doesn’t ease the ache. Just sharpens it into a fresh burst of pain.

“My dad didn’t want me to be a deputy,” he says at last, his voice dry as a husk. “Said I was too young. Told me I should go to college first, or see the world or whatever.”

He doesn’t know if Derek’s listening or not. It doesn’t matter.

“But I did the math. Even with scholarships, I would have been looking at over fifty grand in student loans. I figured this way, getting a job, I’d be less of a burden to him.” He squeezes his eyes shut for a moment. “So much for that, right?”

He knows what some people in town think. Hell, even some of the guys at the station think Stiles only got the job because his dad is the sheriff. Stiles doesn’t care what they think. He’s happy to prove himself. He fucking aced every class at the academy, thanks very much. He could have got a job at any police department or sheriff’s department in the state, but he’d only applied for one. For Beacon Hills. For his dad, mostly, because he didn’t want to leave him, but also for Scotty, who’s a small town kid at heart and never even thought of applying for anywhere else either.

Stiles has always thought of family—and he includes Scott and Scott’s mom Melissa in that—as something tiny and fragile and precarious. He’s always been secretly afraid that by trying too hard to hold onto it, he’d fracture it instead. Maybe that’s what’s happening now. Maybe he should have gone to college after all. At least then he never would have found himself _here_.

“I just want to go home,” he whispers to the wall.

He leans there for as long as he can, muscles trembling. He’s afraid that if he hits the floor again, it’ll be for the last time.

When Stiles’s legs finally give out, Derek is a warm presence at his back, guiding him back to the floor. Stiles ends up sitting crossways on Derek’s lap, his cheek resting on his shoulder, his body supported in a way that still lets him breathe unimpeded. He sleeps, he thinks, or at least time stops moving in a way that makes any sense. He wakes up once when he starts to struggle for breath, only to find Derek carefully straightening him up again, averting the crisis.

“Is this what she did to you too?” Stiles asks him in a whisper. “This how she broke you?”

Derek only shakes his head slightly, and presses his warm hand to the back of Stiles’s neck again.

Stiles closes his eyes and drifts back into an uneasy sleep.

Derek hears Kate coming before Stiles does. Maybe he has better hearing because of the whole werewolf thing. By the time the metal door to the basement screeches open, Stiles is propped up against one wall, and Derek is kneeling by the one opposite.

Stiles squints at Kate.

The way her gaze slides over Derek is creepy as fuck. There’s something predatory about it, possessive. And something smug about it too, like she enjoys tearing out the spine of a man like Derek and putting him on his knees. Kate gloats silently for a moment or two, and then turns her attention to Stiles.

“How you doing, cutie pie?”

If Stiles had any moisture left in his mouth at all, he’d spit in her fucking face, that’s how he’s doing.

Kate hooks a hand under his armpit and drags him to his feet. The pain is incredible. It flares white, and Stiles thinks he tries to scream, but all that comes out is a dry, hoarse sound.

“Come on, baby,” she says with a grin. “It’s time we had a little talk.”

 


	4. Chapter 4

Stiles really has no idea how any of this happened. How his day started so normally with scrambled eggs on toast for breakfast, with shaving in the shower because he was running late _again_ , and with making it to the station just in time after all, to _this_. To sitting on a chair in a dark room somewhere above the basement, his cuffed arms wrenched behind him, pain tearing through him whenever he tries to breathe, and a bright light in his face like this is some sort of Cold War spy movie and he’s sitting on some nuclear codes or something.

Kate’s perched on the table beside the lamp, legs crossed. She’s tapping something against her boot. It’s a stick, or a cane or something. And that’s not the worst thing. If Stiles squints he can see a knife on the table, the blade gleaming. And something that looks like a car battery, with wires spiraling off the top like the curled ribbons of some sick birthday present. There’s also a bottle of water, the sides glistening with moisture like it’s come straight from the fridge. What’s a little interrogation without torture _and_ bribery? Stiles really, really wants that water. And he really doesn’t want the other stuff.

There’s a man standing in the doorway. Stiles can’t see him very clearly because of the glare. He’s maybe an old guy? White-haired. That’s about all Stiles can see for sure.

“Tell me about Laura Hale,” Kate says, her voice low and honey-smooth.

“I don’t know,” Stiles says. “We found a body in the woods.”

“How do you know it’s her?” Kate asks, leaning forward slightly.

Stiles flinches as she taps the cane against his knee. “One of the other deputies went to school with the Hales. Said he thought it was her. And she had… she had Derek’s name and your address in her pocket.”

“How was she killed?” Kate asks.

Stiles blinks into the light. “Someone cut her in half.”

Kate leans back, and laughs. The sound is sickeningly bright.

Stiles doesn’t know why she wants to know this stuff. And he shouldn’t tell her, probably, but Stiles has always had trouble keeping his mouth shut. Ask anyone. And, sure, nobody outside the department knows this stuff yet because it’s part of an ongoing homicide investigation, but Stiles really doesn’t see any point in keeping it to himself. It’s not like he has any actual valuable information about suspects or anything. Because there are no suspects. Really, Stiles doesn’t know any more than anybody else who’d been on the scene.

The old man moves into the room. “Sounds like a hunter.”

Kate strokes the cane against Stiles’s injured cheek. “I think you’re not telling me something, cutie pie.”

“What? No!” Stiles shakes his head.

“Someone cut her in half,” Kate repeats back to him, her tone mocking. “Really?”

Stiles winces as she digs the point of the cane into the cut on his cheek. “She had... she had claw marks too. They said maybe a mountain lion got to her afterward? That’s all I know.”

Except, with a creeping sense of horror, Stiles realizes it’s not all he knows. Because the mountain lion thing makes sense, but not when he considers what he knows now. That something in the woods bit Scott that night, and Scott was turned into a werewolf too. What are the chances that’s unrelated? Stiles doesn’t really believe in coincidences like that. In retrospect there was clearly was a fuckton of supernatural shit going down that night.

Kate looks over at the old man. “Sounds like there’s a new alpha in town then.”

In town…

Are they still in Beacon Hills? Stiles hopes so. And he hopes his dad and Scott are closing in fast.

“Goddamn mongrels,” the old man mutters, his voice like gravel. “Call your brother. Tell him to hunt the alpha.”

“Dad,” Kate says, “I can deal with the alpha.”

“Do it.” The old man grunts. “You have enough to deal with.”

Something like actual emotion crosses Kate’s face at her father’s gruff dismissal, but Stiles doesn’t give a fuck about her daddy issues. His brain is too busy working. Argent. There’s a Chris Argent in town. He’s only been here a few months. He’s a weapons’ dealer. Stiles met him, at a gun show his dad had taken him to. The sheriff was there checking out equipment for the department. Stiles was there for the free hotdogs. He remembers a middle-aged guy with scruffy stubble he totally rocked, a blue gaze, and a firm handshake. Chris Argent was really hot, for an older guy. Is Chris one of _these_ Argents? It’s not a common name.

Maybe.

Stiles closes his eyes, and thinks back to that day. He’d been standing at a booth trying to clean a glob of mustard off his shirt with a napkin, when he’d caught sight of his dad again, and his dad had waved him over.

“This is my son, Stiles,” he’d said. “Stiles, this is Chris Argent.”

“Nice to meet you, Stiles.” Those blue eyes had crinkled when he’d smiled.

“Hi. Likewise.” Stiles had then been briefly distracted by discovering an entirely new glob of mustard, this time on his jeans. He’d tuned in again to hear his dad and Chris Argent talking about the new bar on Maple that sold its own craft beer.

“On Maple?” Chris had asked with a frown. “Near the bookshop?”

“Bookshop’s been closed for years,” John had told him.

It hadn’t occurred to Stiles at the time—or it hadn’t been interesting enough to pursue—but Chris Argent knew Beacon Hills. He might have been new to town, but he’d been here before. He doesn’t know if that means anything. Maybe it doesn’t. But there are those fucking coincidences again. Stiles can’t shake the feeling there’s a big picture here, and he’s just not seeing it.

And it has everything to do with the Hales and the Argents.

“Fine,” Kate says, her gaze still fixed on Stiles. “I’ll call Chris to hunt the alpha.”

_Score._

But also, god fucking dammit, because Stiles just wasted a whole lot of brain power on figuring out a family connection, and Kate just handed it to him on a platter. Killjoy.

And the fact she’s sharing information so freely? Stiles knows what that means. He knows her name. He knows her face. He knows her brother’s name, and he knows her father’s involved too. There’s no way Kate is planning on letting him walk out of here.

And what is an alpha, anyway?

“Don’t tell him about the cop,” the old man says.

“I won’t. What Chris knows can’t hurt him.”

The old man mutters something, and then he walks away. He closes the door behind him.

Kate stares at Stiles blankly for a moment, and then something in her expression shifts and she smiles. “Looks like it’s just us, cutie pie.”

Stiles flinches back as she runs a hand up his inner thigh, nails scraping against his uniform pants.

“What a shame we won’t have more time together,” she says, leaning in close. Her perfume smells of citrus. “But I really do hate loose ends.”

Stiles turns his head away.

“Except Derek,” Kate says thoughtfully. “But then I suppose he’s not exactly a loose end, is he? He’s a trophy.” She laughs, like she expects Stiles to understand the joke. “And, cutie pie, he fucks like a _machine_.”

 _Gross_.

Except it’s not just the thought of Kate’s undoubtedly twisted sex life that turns Stiles’s gut. It’s pity too, because Stiles has absolutely no doubt that Derek’s as much of a victim in this scenario as he is.

Of course, it’s hard to feel sorry for anyone other than himself once Kate picks up the knife.

 

***

 

Back in the basement, Derek rubs his warm hands over Stiles’s skin, carefully stripping off the shreds of his shirt and using the pieces to bandage up the worst of his cuts. Stiles’s hands are still cuffed, and he’s bleeding, and he’s definitely going to die here. It’s unfair. It’s so fucking unfair. Stiles just went to deliver a death message. Wasn’t supposed to be his own.

There’s water now, at least.

Kate threw the bottle at his head after she dragged him back down the steps and dumped him here. Derek lets him sip from it slowly. Everything tastes like blood.

Stiles has no idea how long it’s been when Derek abruptly props him against the wall and then puts as much distance between them as he can.

Not again.

Jesus fuck.

The basement door squeals open.

Derek growls.

Stiles sees polished boots, and tan pants. He raises his gaze with difficulty. Sees a utility belt with a Glock, a Taser, a radio. A uniform shirt like the one he was wearing earlier. A familiar face looking down at him, eyes wide with shock. And the old man standing right behind him.

“Matt,” he rasps at Daehler, relief and fear meeting and clashing in a screaming cacophony in his skull. “Look out!”

“Holy shit, Stiles,” Matt says. “You look like _hell_.”

“Kate worked him over pretty damn hard,” the old man says, with something like grudging pride in his voice.

A sick knot begins to grow in the pit of Stiles’s stomach.

Matt shakes his head slowly. “Hell of a mess, Gerard.”

The old man huffs.

“The whole department’s trying to track her down,” Matt says. “I’ll tell them you haven’t seen her, and that you let me check the house from top to bottom, but sooner or later someone will come asking again, and I can’t guarantee it’ll be me.”

“Understood,” the old man—Gerard—says.

“Matt,” Stiles rasps.

It’s stupid, really, how long it takes Stiles to see what’s going on here. Stiles is the kind of guy who can see a plot twist coming from miles away in every single movie he’s ever watched, so why does it take his brain so long to connect the obvious fucking dots here? Denial, probably. Because he and Matt aren’t best friends or anything, but they took the same oath. They’re supposed to be on the same side.

“Matt,” he says again, voice straining.

Matt ignores him. Just follows Gerard out the door again, and slams it shut behind him.

“Oh fuck.” Stiles can feel panic clawing at him, tearing at his chest, his lungs. “Oh _fuck_.”

Derek is by his side in an instant, lifting him onto his lap. He puts one hand on Stiles’s back and splays the other against his chest, keeping his core straight so he can suck in enough air. Stiles closes his eyes and rests his head on Derek’s shoulder, and tries to force his panic down.

“Breathe in through your nose,” Derek says. His voice is soft. “Breathe in for four.”

Stiles obeys.

“Hold it for seven,” Derek says, and counts it softly for him. “Now out through your mouth for eight.”

Fuck.

Stiles remembers his therapist teaching him how to do this when he was a kid, after he’d had his first panic attack following his mom’s death. It had been a horrible time in his life, when everything was chaotic and nothing made sense. And now he’s being held prisoner in a basement with a werewolf who’s talking him though a relaxation technique, so.

So apparently nothing is ever going to make sense.

Usually Stiles can roll with the punches, but _fuck_. Fucking Matt Daehler. How is Stiles’s dad ever going to find him in time if Matt Daehler says that he wasn’t at Gerard’s house? _How_?

“In for four,” Derek says quietly. “Hold it.”

He’s not. He’s not going to find Stiles. Which means Stiles has two choices. He can either wait until Kate kills him, or he can do whatever the fuck he can to try and get the hell out of here. Admittedly the second plan is a little light on details right now, but Stiles much prefers the potential payoff, so that’s the plan he’s going to focus on.

“And out for eight,” Derek says.

Stiles exhales slowly, feeling his panic start to recede before it thankfully got its claws all the way in.

Okay, so.

Stiles doesn’t have any weapons. Not even his hands.

And he doesn’t have any way to communicate with the outside world.

But he’s got one thing, right?

Stiles has got a werewolf.

Derek Hale. A survivor of one of the biggest tragedies in the history of Beacon Hills. The Hales. The whole family of them, living out in a big old house on the edge of the Preserve. Just far enough from town that by the time the fire department arrived it was too late to save any of them.

Except Laura had been out that night, or something, and had escaped the inferno. Much later, weeks probably, Stiles had listened secretly on the stairs while his dad and some of the other first responders had shared a few beers, and, of course, got around to talking about it.

How Peter Hale was still alive, though he’d probably wish he wasn’t. How he was burned all over, and in an induced coma at the hospital.

How Laura had to be held back by the deputies. How she kept trying to get inside the house while it burned.

And afterward how she kept asking for her brother Derek, insisting he was still alive, but nobody had seen him. Well, all these years later, and Stiles guessed she’d finally found him. Or at least come looking for him, only to meet with a monster in the woods.

Derek Hale had never been officially listed as dead, because his remains had never been found. Everyone had just assumed there wasn’t enough left over to identify.

Everything comes back to the Hales. To fire, and death, and secrets.

More coincidences that Stiles doesn’t believe in.

“How long have you been here, Derek?” he whispers. “With Kate.”

He feels Derek shrug.

“Why do you let her keep you like this?” Stiles asks. It was Ramirez, one of the other deputies who went to school with the Hales, who remembered what Laura looked like.

“They were good kids,” he’d said that night in the Preserve, face pinched tight with regret. “A good family. Laura, she was real popular, but not a bitch about it, you know? Just real outgoing, real friendly. Derek too.”

Stiles can’t imagine it.

“Kate looks after me,” Derek murmurs. “She stops me from shifting. Shifting is—”

“Bad, yeah,” Stiles finishes for him. He leans back into Derek’s warm touch, and wonders if it’s his imagination that it makes the pain bleed away. “Did you ever hurt anyone when you were shifted?”

“No!” Derek sounds almost offended.

“Then why is it bad?”

Derek doesn’t have an answer for that.

“Have you been with Kate since the fire?” Stiles asks.

“Kate looks after me.”

“I never knew your family,” Stiles says. “I think maybe Cora was the year above me, but we weren’t friends. But my dad, well, he knows everyone in town. I’m really sorry they died. Just, you know, everyone thought you were dead too, I guess. But you’re not, so yeah. It’s kinda late to say it, but I’m really sorry they died.”

Derek strokes his thumb against the back of Stiles’s neck. “You should be scared of me.”

Stiles snorts. “You’re not the one who played join the fucking dots on my skin with a knife, so whatever. Dude, you’re holding me up so I can breathe. I mean yeah, if we ever get out of this then we’ll be having a long talk about why you put the cuffs on me in the first place, but I’m not a total idiot. I know who the bad guy is here, and it’s not you.”

“I’m a monster.” He sounds tentative.

“The monster at the end of this book, maybe,” Stiles says. “What? You never read that? Spoiler alert: it’s Grover.”

Derek huffs, and it sounds almost like a laugh. “I read it.”

Stiles closes his eyes. “You’re not a monster.”

Derek doesn’t answer. Stiles knows better than to expect him to.

“I’m really tired,” Stiles murmurs, and Derek slides his hand down his injured back carefully. “I wanna go home."

Derek’s growl jolts Stiles from his lassitude, and he suddenly finds himself lying on his side on the concrete while Derek leaps to his feet and begins to pace back and forth. There’s a sudden wildness to him that reminds Stiles that okay, yes, he _is_ a monster, and that Stiles really has no idea of what he’s dealing with.

“There’s no wolfsbane in here,” Derek says, his voice rumbling into a growl.

Stiles hitches himself into a seated position, wincing at the pain of moving. “That’s good, right? It’s poisonous.”

Derek rounds on him suddenly, claws extending from his fingertips, eyes glowing blue. “I can feel the moon!”

Stiles’s heart stutters. “Wh-what does that mean?”

Derek leaps at him, landing in a crouch beside him. “I can feel _everything_.”

Stiles bites back a terrified whimper as Derek suddenly leans down over him, and presses his face into the crook of his neck. He’s expecting fangs, he thinks. He’s expecting to have his throat ripped out. But Derek just inhales loudly, and bats the side of Stiles’s head in what might be a clumsy attempt at a caress.

“ _Stiles_ ,” he growls, while Stiles pants frantically for breath. Then Derek rears back suddenly, his eyes wide with something like horror, and retreats to the far corner of the room. He hunkers down there, his back turned.

“Derek?” Stiles whispers as soon as his heart rediscovers its regular rhythm. “Derek?”

Of course Derek doesn’t answer.

 


	5. Chapter 5

Stiles doesn’t really dream when he finally falls asleep. He thinks he hallucinates or something though, because the things he sees are so much more vivid than any dream he’s ever known. He sees his mom, and she’s humming some old song to him. The one about cambric shirts and a sickle of leather. The one with rosemary and thyme. Rosemary is for remembrance, she tells Stiles in the dream, but it’s not a sprig of rosemary she’s holding out to him. It’s something else with purple flowers. It’s wolfsbane.

“Mom,” Stiles gasps, jolting awake again.

He’s in the basement, propped against the wall. His shoulders are killing him. He can’t feel his hands. And in the corner Derek is hunched over, and he’s retching. The floor is splattered with more of the black stuff he’d vomited up back at Kate’s house.

“Are you sick?” Stiles asks.

Derek shakes his head and heaves again. Then he stills, alert, and falls silent.

Moments later the basement door screeches open.

“Derek,” Kate says, her voice heavy with fake sympathy. “Are you okay, sweetie? It looks like you’ve made a mess.”

“I’m sorry, Kate,” Derek says, his voice soft, his gaze fixed on the floor.

Kate crosses to him, and cards her fingers through his hair. “Aw, sweetie. It’s not your fault.”

Stiles watches as Derek seems to sag in relief at her words.

Kate twists Derek’s hair between her fingers, the gesture oddly affectionate, and smiles at Stiles. “Didn’t you play with your little chew toy, sweetie? You won’t get in trouble if you do. You wanna let your wolf off its leash for just a little while, hmm?”

Derek shakes his head almost frantically.

“But sweetie,” Kate smirks, “he’s just so _pretty_.”

Stiles’s skin crawls, and he resists the urge to draw his legs up and shield his body. Because he knows it won’t make a difference. Because he knows it’ll just be painting a bigger target on himself for a sadist like Kate.

“Look at him, sweetie,” Kate says, and twists Derek’s head so he has no choice. “Look at those big, sweet eyes, and that hot cock-sucking mouth.”

Wow. Apparently he should have got Kate to write his OkCupid profile. Or the Grindr profile he absolutely doesn’t have and only uses when he’s out of town anyway.

Kate’s smirk grows into a wide grin, and Stiles knows she’s trying to freak him out. Scare the hostage with some rapey talk. Which isn’t to say she won’t do it. She totally fucking would. But she might not, if Stiles doesn’t give her the reaction she’s chasing. And Stiles has a feeling that reaction is crying and begging her not to hurt him. He stays quiet instead, fixing his gaze on an indeterminate point on the opposite wall, and concentrates on breathing shallowly so it doesn’t hurt.

Stiles’s dad always says that in this job you see bad things, the very worst of people, and you’ll drive yourself crazy trying to figure out the reasons. Sometimes things just don’t make a lick of sense, however many times you go over them.

Stiles thinks again of listening in on his dad and the other deputies talking about the Hale fire that time. They way they talked it over again and again, not saying anything new, just trying against all hope to somehow reconcile the fact they were living in a world that could be so unfair. Stiles was too young at the time to understand what they were doing, what they were struggling with, but he knows it now. When he was a kid he’d only thought it was strange and pointless for these guys to keep going through every little detail, to keep wondering aloud how they might have got a different outcome. Strange and pointless, he’d thought at the time. But, he came to realize, also necessary. They weren’t talking about the fire at all, not really. They were just trying to maintain the illusion of order in a chaotic world.

Stiles could use some of that, right about now.

“You don’t want to play, sweetie?” Kate asks Derek, her voice bright. “Last chance.”

“I’m good, Kate,” Derek whispers. “I’m being good. The wolf’s not good.”

“I know,” Kate croons. “I know. But just this once. I’d be so _proud_.”

Stiles’s dad always says a situation can turn on a dime.

Like yesterday did, Stiles guesses.

Like now.

Because suddenly Stiles in on his back, swallowing down a scream at the white tear of pain across his shoulders, and Derek is crouching over him. He’s not shifted, but there’s something sharper about his gaze, something animalistic, and his hands, his warm, gentle hands, are pawing roughly at Stiles’s chest, at his face, at his fly, while Kate laughs in delight.

“No,” Stiles gasps. “No.”

Derek hunkers down over him, and shoves his face against Stiles’s neck.

“No, Derek,” Stiles babbles. “God, please, no!”

Derek shifts back slightly, and raises himself up enough to stare into Stiles’s eyes.

“Don’t,” Stiles whispers, his throat aching with tears. “You’re better than this! Don’t let her hurt you like this!”

Derek freezes, and blinks slowly.

“Derek.” Kate’s voice is soft, but there’s steel underneath that tone.

Derek keeps his gaze fixed on Stiles’s. “Laura…” He shakes his head, as though to clear it. “Laura was looking for me?”

“She had your address,” Stiles tells him, his heart pounding desperately. “In her pocket.”

“Derek!”

Derek turns his head toward Kate. “You said _nobody_ was looking for me.”

“What does it matter?” Kate asks, lifting her chin. “You think she would have liked what she found? You think she would have forgiven you if she knew the truth? How they all burned except you, because I’d left you sleeping in my bed?”

A chill clenches at Stiles’s heart at the implication. At _both_ the implications. His dad had always thought the Hale fire was arson, even when the fire investigator signed it off as an electrical fault.

“You did that?” he rasps. “You set the fire?”

Kate’s proud smile sickens him.

“You killed eight people,” Stiles says.

“I put down eight rabid dogs,” Kate corrects him. “And I couldn’t have done it without lover boy here.”

Stiles looks up at Derek, shocked. The fire was ten years ago now. Derek would have been a _kid_. Not that Stiles is surprised, exactly, because Kate’s a psycho fucking bitch who was clearly born without any moral compass or basic sense of decency at all, but Jesus… Suddenly it doesn’t seem so strange that Derek’s so beaten down, so twisted up the way Kate likes him. He was just a kid.

Is this why he’s so sure he’s a monster?

“I’m so sorry,” Stiles whispers. “Derek, I’m so sorry.”

Derek buries his face in the crook of Stiles’s neck again.

Kate stands over them, and rolls her eyes. “While this is very touching, cutie pie, I’m afraid that if you’re not going to provide my puppy here with any entertainment, then it’s time for you to say goodbye.”

She reaches down to pull Derek off him.

And everything turns on a fucking dime.

 

***

 

It happens so fast—the sensations, the images, the sounds—that Stiles can’t parse one from the other.

The blur of movement as Derek rears off him.

Kate’s grunt of surprise.

The sudden loss of Derek’s warmth, washing over him like cold water.

The short, sharp crack of Kate’s skull hitting the concrete wall as Derek tosses her like she weighs fucking _nothing_.

The smear of dark blood she leaves behind when she crumples unconscious to the floor.

And then Derek is hauling him to his feet, and Stiles is biting down a scream.

The door screeches as Derek wrenches it open.

Then they’re on the stairs, Stiles stumbling a little.

Then they’re in a hallway, and Stiles is sick with anticipation.

Derek moves quietly. Stops once to listen. Guides Stiles with a hand on his shoulder. Pushes open a door.

Sunlight.

Fucking _sunlight_.

They’re out.

 

***

 

Gerard Argent’s house is a little way out of town. Stiles thinks they’re on Creek Road. The houses here are spaced far apart. Even in the middle of the day there’s no traffic, but they’re careful to keep to the trees at the side of the road.

When the woman tending her garden sees them, she shrieks and puts her hands over her mouth, and Stiles remembers he’s a blood-covered mess.

“Call 911,” Stiles says, staggering toward her. “Please. Call 911.”

He stumbles, and Derek catches him before he hits the ground.

The sudden wrenching pain in his shoulders drives him over the edge.

He blacks out.

 

***

 

“Stiles? _Stiles_?”

He’s in… an ambulance? And his dad is leaning over him, relief and heartbreak battling in his expression. Every jolt of the ambulance drives pain through Stiles’s shoulders and back, but he doesn’t even care, because it’s his dad.

“Dad,” he mumbles. “Daddy.”

And he can be weirded out by that later, but for now who even cares? Dad is everything to him, okay, but Daddy is the guy he used to run to crying when he scraped his knees, and that’s the guy he needs right now. The one who could kiss every tiny injury better. The one who made sure there were no monsters under his bed. The one who picked him up and cuddled him when the world seemed too scary. And it turns out the world is totally fucking scary.

The ambulance is flooded with bright light as the paramedics wrench open the back doors, and Stiles is jostled on his stretcher into the hospital. There are nurses and doctors waiting. Someone has a pair of bolt cutters too.

“Stiles,” Melissa McCall says. “We’re going to give you some morphine, okay?”

Yes please. Stiles wants all the morphine, but not straight away.

“Dad,” he manages. “Dad, it’s Matt. Matt Daehler was there.”

“Okay,” his dad says. He strokes Stiles’s hair. “Okay, kiddo. I’ll take care of it.”

“Where’s Derek?”

“He’s fine, Stiles. He’ll be fine.”

Morphine now. Please and thank you.

Stiles sinks into a blissful haze. He can feel them jostling him as they work at the hinge of the cuffs with the bolt cutters, but it doesn’t hurt. Nothing hurts.

It’s pretty damn sweet.

 

***

 

When Stiles wakes up, it’s in a darkened hospital room. His shoulders fucking ache, but he’s propped up on a bunch of firm pillows, so it’s not too bad. His hands are lying on top of the covers. His fingers are weird and swollen. When Stiles tries to move them, sharp pains stab through them. His wrists are bandaged. Everything smells a little like antiseptic. There’s a canula sticking out of the back of his left hand, feeding fluids into him.

Stiles tries to reach for the call button with his right hand, but he can’t make his fingers grip.

“Hey?” he yells instead. “Hello?”

Melissa appears, eyebrows raised. “Are you trying to wake the entire floor, Stiles?”

“Maybe. Give it to me straight, doc. Will I ever play the violin again?”

“You know I’m not authorized to give you your diagnosis,” Melissa says.

“I’d prefer someone who knows what they’re talking about, thanks,” Stiles tells her. “It can be our little secret, right? I can act all surprised in the morning when the doctor tells me.”

Melissa sits down on the end of his bed and smacks him on the knee. “You have neuropraxia, which is a type of nerve damage, caused in your case by the disruption of the blood supply to your hands. The good news is you should get full function back. The bad news is it could take anywhere between days to weeks.”

“The better news is I’m not dead,” Stiles says.

Melissa’s smile wavers, and she pats his knee gently. “Yes, Stiles. That’s the best news in the world.”

“I could really use a hug though,” Stiles confesses.

Melissa opens her arms and lets him lean into them.

“You’d better not tell Scott I cried,” Stiles mumbles into her shoulder.

“Stiles, you’re still in shock,” Melissa says firmly. “And you’re not the only one crying.”

Ever since his mom died, Melissa has been like Stiles’s second mom. He and Scott always joke about crowd-sharing their parents. Scott’s dad took off when Scott was a kid, and good riddance, frankly. So between them, John Stilinksi and Melissa McCall raised both their sons in some kind of weird timeshare thing that sort of actually worked. Melissa taught Stiles how to cook, and John taught Scott how to shave. But also, fuck gender roles, because Melissa taught Stiles how to change a tire, and John taught Scott how to iron a shirt properly. And, mortifyingly, they both took care of sex education together. Melissa, because she’s a nurse and knows her shit, and John because he’s a guy and knows, specifically, guy shit.

Stiles still remembers when the guidance counselor at the school asked Scott what he wanted to be, and Scott said he wanted to go into law enforcement.

“Oh,” Ms. Morrell had said. “Following in your father’s footsteps?”

Scott had bristled. “No.” He’d pointed at Stiles. “I’m following in _his_ father’s footsteps.”

Stiles leans back onto his pillows again, and wipes his face with his forearm. “Where’s my dad? And Scotty?”

“Both working around the clock on this,” Melissa tells him. “I’ll text John, okay? Let him know you’re awake.”

“I’m kinda hungry too,” Stiles says hopefully.

Melissa scruffs his hair. “I’ll go and get you some pudding.”

“Chocolate?” he asks.

“Of course! Who do you think you’re dealing with here?” Her scandalized look would be more believable if her eyes weren’t still wet.

She gives him another long hug before she leaves.

By the time John arrives at the hospital, Stiles has finished a pudding cup and is trying to beg Melissa into spoon feeding him another one, because fuck his hands.

“No,” Melissa says firmly. “You haven’t eaten anything in almost forty-eight hours, Stiles. Any more, and you’ll be sick.”

“My stomach doesn’t believe you,” Stiles tells her, and it gurgles right on cue.

Two days? Was it really two whole days? Stiles doesn’t know why that’s so hard to wrap his head around. It’s not like he had any way to judge the passage of time. And he was pretty out of it for a lot of the time.

“Listen to Melissa, kid,” John says gruffly from the door, and Stiles immediately forgets the pudding.

“Dad!”

John leans over his bed and hugs him close. “Jesus, kid. I’m so fucking glad to see you.”

“Me too.” Stiles inhales deeply, and shivers. “God, me too.”

John leans back, and sits down on the chair beside the bed. “Kid, what the hell even happened?”

“I’ll leave you to it,” Melissa says quietly, and slips outside.

Stiles waits until the door clicks shut before he speaks. “Um, so, _werewolves_?”

John sighs, and rubs his hand over his face. “Werewolves.”

Stiles is a little affronted. His dad doesn’t seem at all shocked. He just seems resigned, like, okay yeah, he’s accidentally boarded the crazy train, and now he’s stuck on it until the next station and he’s just going to have to deal with it. “Did Scott steal my Big Werewolf Reveal Thunder?”

“That’s not a thing,” John tells him.

“It could be. It was supposed to be.”

“Stiles,” John says in that warning tone he uses whenever he sees Stiles is about to branch off onto a tangent. “When we got to Kate Argent’s house, and you weren’t there but your badge was…” He shakes his head. “Scott _shifted_? Is that the word? Anyway, suddenly I’m in a room with Lon Chaney Jr.”

“Did you scream like a six-year-old girl?” Stiles asks him.

John gives him a narrow look. “No.”

“Me neither,” Stiles lies. “So, werewolves. I think like maybe the Argents hunt them or something? The Hale fire! Kate said she set the Hale fire! Did you get her?”

“Gerard Argent’s house was empty,” John says with a sigh.

“Did you check it yourself?” Stiles demands. “Because what if it’s another Matt Daehler special?”

John reaches out and curls his fingers around Stiles’s right hand. Stiles can feel the warmth, the gentle pressure, but it’s dull, blunted. Like his hand’s asleep. “I checked it myself.”

“Please tell me you got Matt at least?” Stiles demands.

John’s face falls. “Kid, I’m sorry. We got the 911 from the lady out on Creek Road that she’d found you, and he must’ve heard the call on the radio. By the time you told me he was in on it, he was already gone.”

“Fuck,” Stiles says, but a part of him is too tired to care. He’s alive, he’s safe, and that’s enough of a miracle to deal with now, right? More than enough. “Where’s Derek? Is he okay?”

John sighs again. “He’s fine. He’s being looked after.”

“By who?” Stiles asks. “Where?”

“Stiles,” John says, and Stiles feels dread starting to form, oily slick, in his stomach. “I didn’t know what the hell else to do with him, okay?”

Stiles tugs his numb hand out of his father’s. “Where is he, Dad?”

“He’s in Eichen,” John says. “Derek’s in Eichen House.”


	6. Chapter 6

The moment Stiles is discharged from hospital the next afternoon, he calls Scott to come and pick him up, and they drive out to Eichen House.

“I know you’re pissed,” Scott says, buckling Stiles’s seatbelt for him because his damn fingers are still numb and useless, “but where else were we supposed to put him?”

“I don’t know, Scott,” Stiles mutters. “Somewhere that they _didn’t_ film American Horror Story?”

Eichen House is a mental institution on the outskirts of town. When Stiles was fifteen and struggling with some stuff—getting bullied, his sexuality, the depression that he’d battled since his mom’s death—his therapist had suggested he spend a week at Eichen. It would be good for him, she’d said. Group therapy, and a safe space, and whatever. She’d made it sound like a holiday camp.

So Stiles and his dad had taken the referral and driven out to Eichen, Stiles clutching his pillow to his chest.

And then they’d got there. The exterior of the place looked like the set of a horror movie. The inside wasn’t any better.

“No,” Stiles had said, taking one look at the beefy orderlies, the locks on the doors, and the bars on the windows. “No, no, _no_.”

His dad had put a hand on his shoulder and steered him straight back to the car. The next day, Stiles had changed therapists.

“I know that place is creepy as fuck,” Scott says, “but, Stiles, he needed to be somewhere safe, okay? Somewhere the Argents can’t get to him, _and_ somewhere he can’t hurt anyone.”

“What about you, Scotty?” Stiles asks. “Should we lock you up somewhere you can’t hurt anyone?”

Scott clenches the steering wheel. “Stiles…”

“I get it,” Stiles says, turning his face away to watch the trees flash past the windows. “I don’t like it, but I get it.”

He does get it. His dad and Scott and the entire department are getting smashed at work. First, because of the investigation into Laura Hale’s murder, and now because of the investigation into Stiles’s abduction, and to top it all off they’re re-opening the file on the fire that killed the Hales. So, sure, nobody’s got time to babysit a werewolf. Stiles gets it, but that doesn’t make it right.

“So who else knows about the werewolf thing?” Stiles asks at last.

“Me, obviously,” Scott says. “And your dad. That’s it.”

“You didn’t tell your mom yet?”

Scott winces. “I’m sort of trying to figure out how to break it to her without, you know, breaking her brain at the same time.”

“Yeah,” Stiles says. “How’s it going? Like, are you wolfing out all the time?”

“No.” Scott sighs. “I can smell things a lot more than I used to. And my hearing is really sharp now. Also, I have like superhero reflexes or something. But the only times I’ve gone all _grrr_ have been with Derek that time, and then when I smelled your blood at Kate Argent’s house.”

“What’s it feel like?” Stiles asks curiously. “Going _grrr_?”

Scott glances at him. “It’s scary, Stiles. Really fucking scary. Like there’s this thing inside me, and I don’t have any control over it.”

Stiles chews his lip. “You think that stuff about the full moon is true?”

“I don’t know.” Scott fixes his gaze on the road again. “I hope not.”

It’s still two weeks until the full moon.

“We should ask Derek,” Stiles decides. “I mean, if there’s anything we need to do or whatever.”

“Yeah,” Scott says faintly. “That’s a good idea.”

They spend the rest of the drive in silence. Stiles wishes he could change the radio station, but he can’t, so they follow the sweep of the road at the bottom of East Beacon to the accompaniment of Meghan Trainor teaching the kids about consent in the ridiculously upbeat NO. Because, really, if a moment ever called for Adele, this is probably it.

The day is cool. Clouds are rolling in from over the hills. Stiles slouches down in his seat and shoves his hands into the pouch of his hoodie.

His hands are aching today, which is an improvement from no feeling at all. His shoulders are still giving him hell as well. He has a physio appointment tomorrow that’s no doubt going to hurt like fuck, but at least he hasn’t torn his rotator cuffs.

It’s starting to rain by the time they reach Eichen House, because of course the place is so goddamn evil that even the weather falls in line.

Scott parks as close to the main doors as he can, and then races around the car to open Stiles’s door for him, and help him get out of his seatbelt.

They hurry toward the entrance.

Stiles shakes rain from his hair when they get inside, and peers anxiously around at reception. And, okay, maybe it’s not as nightmarish as he remembers from when he was fifteen, but it’s dreary and depressing, and Stiles wouldn’t wish it on his worst enemy. And yes, they still have bars on the windows.

“Hi,” Scott says, showing his police ID to the woman at the reception desk. “We’re here to visit Derek Hale.”

The woman takes his ID and inspects it, then looks pointedly at Stiles.

Scott sighs, and fishes Stiles’s ID out of the pocket of his jeans.

“Little bit to the left, bro,” Stiles suggests.

The woman looks unimpressed.

What? He and Scott have never had very clear boundaries. Stiles is pretty sure they crossed the last one about an hour ago when Scott had to unzip his fly for him so he could pee. Could have been worse. At least he can hold his own dick.

“Wait there,” the woman tells them, and vanishes into a back office.

Stiles stares at posters on the walls. They’re all about mental health. They’re faded, the corners curling up. They’re somehow more depressing than the gray walls they’re covering up.

A few minutes later a side door opens with a beep, and an orderly steps through. “Follow me.”

Stiles expects to meet with Derek in a common room or something. The sort of place where the inmates are doing craft work with macaroni and beads, and Jack Nicholson is about to fucking snap.

Really, Stiles watches too many movies.

Instead, the orderly leads them up several sets of steps.

“Derek’s in isolation,” he says over his shoulder.

“Why?” Stiles asks.

“It’s a precautionary measure,” the orderly replies, which is so fucking vague that Stiles kind of wants to punch the guy.

They reach Derek’s room at last. HALE is scrawled on a small whiteboard next to the door handle. There’s a clipboard hanging underneath that. The orderly rattles his keys, and at last turns one in the lock, and pulls the door open.

“I’ll wait out here,” he says.

The room is small and clean. There is no window. There’s a single cot in the middle of the floor, with a bare mattress. Derek’s sitting on the mattress, his back to the door, his bare feet planted on the floor.

“Derek?” Stiles asks tentatively.

Derek twists around, his eyes flashing blue. Then he stands up and retreats to the corner of the room. Sinks down onto his haunches onto the floor.

“Hey, Derek,” Stiles says. “How are you doing?”

Derek stares at the floor.

“You remember Scott, right? We wanted to ask you if there’s anything he should know. Like what he can expect with the full moon and stuff?”

No response.

Stiles sits down on the bed in front of him. “Can you look at me, Derek? So I know you’re not drugged up the eyeballs or whatever?”

Derek lifts his gaze. “Drugs don’t work on me.”

“Ah, see,” Stiles says. “This is kinda the stuff we need to know. Hear that, Scotty? No more popping e’s at music festivals for you.”

Scott just raises his eyebrows. “That was never really an issue.”

“I just don’t want you to waste your money, bro.”

Scott snorts.

Derek drops his gaze again.

“I wanted to thank you,” Stiles tells Derek. “For saving me. I know how hard it must’ve been for you to stand up to Kate—”

“It was bad,” Derek whispers, folding down into himself. “I was bad.”

“Derek,” Stiles tells him, fighting a sudden rise of nausea. “It wasn’t bad, okay? You saved my life.”

“Bad,” Derek whispers, pressing against the wall like he’s trying to disappear into it. “The wolf is bad.”

“Hey,” Stiles says, more sharply than he intends. “If it was the wolf who threw that bitch against the wall, the wolf is a fucking hero!”

Derek hunches down further and whines.

“Stiles,” Scott says in a warning tone.

“Sorry.” Stiles closes his eyes briefly and sucks in a deep breath. He remembers the hold that Kate has over him, even now. “Derek, I’m sorry.”

Derek doesn’t look up at him again.

“Derek?”

“Stiles,” Scott sighs. “Let’s go, okay? We’ll come back another time.”

Stiles feels a rush of guilt. He pushed Derek too hard, probably. It’s not like he can expect Derek to magically be better now he’s free of Kate, just because she’s not here. Proximity has nothing to do with it. Not when she’s got a hold of him like a disease.

“Yeah,” he says, rising to his feet again. “We’ll come back another time.”

Outside in the hallway he leans against the wall and knocks his head back against it a few times, castigating himself for being an idiot.

Scott gives him a sympathetic smile, and then frowns suddenly.

“What?”

Scott unhooks the clipboard from beside the door. “Dude, check this out.”

Stiles looks at the page attached to the board. He sees they haven’t been Derek’s only visitors. He had another one this morning. Alan Deaton.

Scott frowns. “Why is Kylo’s vet visiting Derek Hale?”

 

***

 

On their way back to town, Scott gets a text message.

“Your dad just arrested Chris Argent.”

Stiles sits up straighter. “Seriously?”

“Yeah.” Scott raises his eyebrows. “Wanna go see?”

“Hell, yes.”

 

***

 

“Hell, no,” John Stilinski says firmly when Stiles barges through the station toward the holding cells.

“Dad, c’mon!”

“You can watch,” John says. “But stay the hell out of the interview room.”

It’s good enough for Stiles. He and Scott slip into the narrow room next to the interview room, and peer through the one-sided glass at the table and chairs inside. It’s not long until Jordan Parrish shows Chris Argent inside, and John joins them.

“Dad’s totally going to play bad cop,” Stiles says.

“Because Parrish is a marshmallow,” Scott agrees.

“Says Mr. Stay Puft himself. Anyway, don’t let his baby face fool you. Parrish is a marshmallow with a core of _steel_.”

Scott elbows him.

Chris Argent is as hot as Stiles remembers. Like, he completely validates Stiles’s daddy kink. It’s the beard streaked with gray maybe. Or the way he looks his age, but also looks totally badass. Something about the guy just screams experience and authority, and who doesn’t love that combination? Stiles is certainly a fan. Okay, so he’s pretty much cooled off on the guy ever since he met the rest of his psychotic family, but he’s still allowed to _look_ , right?

Chris Argent also looks totally calm and relaxed about being in police custody, in a way that most people just aren’t. Even innocent people— _especially_ innocent people, actually—are nervous as hell in these circumstances.

So yeah.

Snap decision made.

Chris Argent is guilty as fuck.

“Mr. Argent,” John says, leaning back in his chair like he’s settling in for a long while. “Let’s talk about your sister and your father. When did you see them last?”

“Kate, about a month ago,” Chris says. “My father, longer. We don’t see eye to eye.”

“On what?” John asks. “Politics? Or kidnapping officers of the law?”

Chris doesn’t even look put out. “I had nothing to do with that.”

It’s true, actually. Stiles remembers that Gerard told Kate not to tell Chris about him. And Stiles told his dad everything he remembers from his captivity. But hey, anything to try and get a rise out of the guy. To unsettle him. Maybe put a few cracks in that stoic exterior.

“You know what the penalty is for abducting and torturing an officer of the law?”

“No,” Chris replies, annoyingly unruffled. “And it’s none of my business, since I had nothing to do with it.”

John and Parrish exchange a look.

“He’s telling the truth,” Scott says, frowning at the window.

“What? How do you know?”

“Like, when people lie their bodies react,” Scott says. “Their heart rates go up.”

“So?”

“So I can _hear_ heartbeats now!”

“Holy shit!” Stiles’s jaw drops. Snap decision revoked. “That’s incredible! We really need to start writing all this stuff down. Also, you need to ask Ramirez if he took my pen that time, because I’m pretty sure he did.”

“Yeah Stiles,” Scott deadpans. “I’ll get right on the Case of the Missing Pen.”

“Crime is crime, Scotty,” Stiles tells him piously, then shuts up because he catches his dad glancing at the one-way glass, and how loud exactly were they being?

Parrish shuffles some papers in the file in front of him. “What can you tell us about Derek Hale, Mr. Argent?”

“Who?” Chris Argent’s face screws up in confusion.

“Derek Hale,” Parrish repeats. “He was found in your father’s basement, along with Deputy Stilinski.”

“Derek _Hale_ ,” Chris says, and Stiles doesn’t need to be a werewolf to read the man’s confusion. Derek’s name is definitely coming out of left field for him.

“You remember the Hales,” John tells him. “They lived out in the Preserve. Most of the family was killed in a house fire.”

“I heard about that,” Chris says.

Of _course_ he heard about it, because if Laura was a werewolf and Derek is a werewolf, then probably the entire family was made up of werewolves, and werewolves are apparently something the Argents hunt. Gerard had told Kate to tell Chris to hunt the alpha.

Stiles really should try and find out what an alpha is at some point.

“You were living in Arizona at the time, is that right?” Parrish asks.

“Tucson,” Chris confirms.

“And now you’re back,” John says, tapping his fingers on the table.

“What do you mean Derek Hale was found in my father’s basement?” Chris asks with a frown.

“Apparently he’d been living with your sister Kate since the fire,” John says.

“That’s impossible. Kate would never let a—” He clamps his mouth shut.

“A what?” John asks, but of course Chris doesn’t answer that. “I’ve reopened the investigation into the fire. I believe your sister was responsible. That’s what, eight counts of homicide?”

“Eight,” Parrish agrees.

“Plus deprivation of liberty, statutory rape, assault, and I think we can go on and throw a conspiracy to commit murder in there too, what do you think, Parrish?”

“Might as well, Sheriff,” Parrish agrees.

“And that’s before we even get to what happened with my deputy,” John says.

Chris holds up his hand. “Statutory rape?”

“Derek Hale was sixteen,” John says.

“Kate wouldn’t...” Chris shakes his head. “Not with…”

“With a _kid_?” John asks, but Stiles knows what he’s really asking: With a _werewolf_?

“Jesus Christ,” Chris says under his breath. “Jesus fucking Christ.”

And if Stiles wasn’t such a suspicious-minded cynic, he’d say that, right now, he was watching a man’s entire worldview crumble.

 

***

 

Hours later, Stiles is trying to figure out how to make mac and cheese without the use of his hands, when his dad comes home bearing pizza. Because he is the best dad.

“You let him go,” Stiles says, reading the expression on his dad’s face.

“Had nothing to hold him on, kiddo,” John says with a sigh, and sets the pizza down on the table. “Can’t arrest the guy just because he’s related to some psychos.”

“He’s a hunter, I think,” Stiles says. “Like a werewolf hunter?”

“Is that a thing?”

“Kate and Gerard were going to get him to hunt the alpha. Which is I think maybe what bit Scott?”

“What the hell is an alpha?” John asks.

“I have no idea,” Stiles says. “But I’m going to figure it out.”

“Kiddo,” John says with a sigh, and pulls Stiles into a hug. “You’re on sick leave, remember? Which means you’re off the case.”

“Yeah, but I can still—”

“Stiles, I _want_ you off the case,” John says firmly.

“Dad!”

“I thought you were _dead_ , Stiles.” John buries his face in Stiles’s hair.

Stiles shivers. “I’m okay, Dad. I’m okay.”

It’s a long time before his dad releases him.

“Come on,” John says. Let’s go and eat in front of the TV. I need to watch something mindless that will rot my brain.”

“Jersey Shore?” Stiles suggests.

“Not that mindless.”

They settle on a rerun of Stargate Atlantis, which Stiles argues is not mindless at all, actually. John shuts him up by shoving pizza in his mouth, because he fumbles every piece he tries to pick up.

Stiles eventually falls asleep on the couch, leaning up against his dad. His last thought as he drifts off are of Derek, sitting alone of the floor of that stark little room in Eichen House, and if he even realizes he’s not a prisoner anymore.

Of course he doesn’t realize it.

Because of course he’s still not free.


	7. Chapter 7

Stiles wakes up the next morning with stabbing pains in his hands. But he can also actually make a fist now, so yay him. A return to basic motor functions means that he can also undress himself, and turn the shower on, and yes, wipe his own ass. Stiles never thought that would be a cause for celebration.

His dad has already gone to work by the time Stiles gets downstairs. That’s what the note on the fridge says: _Gone to work. No!!!_

“Rude,” Stiles tells his Lucky Charms, because of course his dad knew Stiles’s first instinct would be to head down to the station to see what was happening.

Luckily he doesn’t know about Stiles’s second instinct.

Stiles knows Scott’s roster as well as his own. He knows Scott is at work at the moment. So he heads outside and climbs into his Jeep, winces as he puts it into gear, and heads on over to Scott’s place.

When he pulls the Jeep up outside Scott’s apartment block, he has to sit there for a moment and carefully massage his aching hands. With his aching hands. It’s like the Inception of painful hand massage.

Stiles has a key to Scott’s place. He lets himself in quietly, and peers around the living room. “Kylo? Where are you, evil cat?”

Kylo yowls at him from the cabinet under the TV, where he’s systematically destroying all of Scott’s game cases. And Scott thinks he’s adorable.

Stiles heads for the closet where Scott keeps Kylo’s carrier, and hauls it out. Then he gets down on his hands and knees in front of the TV cabinet and tries to glare Kylo into submission. It doesn’t work. In the end he grabs the cat and shoves him in the cage. Kylo bites his finger hard enough to draw blood.

“I fucking hate you,” Stiles sighs.

Kylo glares at him, tail lashing.

“I am so going to laugh when you get your temperature taken,” Stiles tells him. He hoists the carrier off the floor awkwardly, and heads back outside.

 

***

 

Stiles is terrible an undercover work, it turns out.

“Mr. Stilinksi,” Alan Deaton says. “Distemper is not very common in cats.”

“Rabies?” Stiles hazards.

“What makes you think he has rabies?”

“He bit me.” Stiles holds his finger out.

The vet raises his eyebrows, then rattles around on a shelf under the examination table and produces a bottle of something red. He shakes it, twists the cap off, and upends the bottle onto a cotton ball. Then he presses the cotton ball against Stiles’s finger. It stings.

“Ouch.”

Deaton strokes Kylo. “You say you’re cat-sitting Kylo?”

“Yes.” Cat-sitting, cat-stealing, what’s the difference? And really, what judge is going to believe anyone can actually steal a cat that doesn’t want to be stolen in the first place? Cats don’t put up with shit like that. And Kylo would make an incredibly hostile witness. Stiles figures he’s safe from prosecution.

“Well, my records show that Kylo was in here two weeks ago for his vaccinations and his regular check up. And his temperature is fine. He has no signs of worms or fleas. Perhaps if he’s been acting oddly, it’s because of a change in his routine. Some animals can be very highly strung.”

“Oh,” Stiles says, because he’s got nothing.

Deaton bundles Kylo back into his carrier and gives Stiles a shrewd look. “Did it occur to you, Deputy Stilinski, that you could just ask me what you want to know about the Hales?”

“What?”

“It would have saved you the consultation fee,” Deaton points out.

Right.

Except Stiles doesn’t know a thing about Deaton, only that he visited Derek in Eichen House. He doesn’t know whose side the vet is on. Shit. Stiles doesn’t even know how many sides there are in this. The whole thing could be some complex sort of decahedron.

“I was trying to play my cards close to my chest,” Stiles admits.

The vet cocks an eyebrow. “Are you sure you’re playing with a full deck?”

What? Is the guy seriously throwing shade at Stiles right now? It’s hard to tell, since he appears to have no actual discernable emotions apart from smug. Which isn’t really an emotion, and might just be Stiles projecting.

“Deputy,” Deaton says. “I know who you are, because Derek told me when I went to visit him. And I went to visit him because I was once a close associate of his family.” Oh, now there’s an emotion. It’s one that Stiles knows all too well. It’s sorrow, and it seems to cast a shadow over the entire room.

“How did you know he was in Eichen?” Stiles asks.

“My sister is a psychologist. She works there.” Deaton doesn’t seem offended by the question. “I didn’t know he was still in Beacon Hills. That he has been, all this time. That Kate Argent…”

“Broke him,” Stiles says softly.

Deaton clears his throat. “Yes.”

Kylo yowls unhappily from inside his carrier.

“So, you’re a vet,” Stiles says. “Do you know much about wolves?”

“A little,” Deaton says, the corners of his mouth lifting very slightly. “I know a lot more about werewolves."

And there it is. The elephant in the room. Well, if the elephant was hairy, growly, and had fangs. And was a werewolf.

“It’s probably my pain meds talking right now,” Stiles says hesitantly, “but can I trust you?”

“That’s an odd question,” Deaton says. He pokes his fingers into Kylo’s carrier, and the cat rubs his head against them. “A trustworthy man would say yes, but so would an untrustworthy one.”

Oh Jesus. If this is going to turn into one of those mind traps where there is a village full of honest people and a village full of liars, and he’s only allowed to ask one question, then Stiles is _out_.

“I’ll tell you anything you need to know,” Deaton says. “But I trust you’ll verify with Derek that I’m on his side.”

That is actually really good advice. Probably exactly the sort of advice the secret villain would give, right, just to try and trick the intrepid-but-also-kind-of-buzzy-from-his-meds hero?

“Okay,” Stiles says. “What’s an alpha?”

“An alpha is the leader of a werewolf pack,” Deaton tells him. “Talia Hale, Derek’s mother, was their alpha. The alpha power is passed to one of the other pack members in the event of death, unless the alpha is killed by another werewolf. In that case, the alpha power goes to the killer. Alphas are the only ones who can turn someone by biting them.”

Okay, so.

Stiles nods slowly. “So who was alpha after Talia?”

“I suspect it was Laura.”

“Oh.” Suddenly what Kate and Gerard was saying about her death makes sense. “So the werewolf that killed Laura is an alpha now?”

“Laura was killed by a werewolf?” Deaton asks. “Are you sure of that?”

“I’m not sure of anything, dude,” Stiles tells him. “But Kate and Gerard Argent were, and they seems to be experts as well.”

“They’re hunters,” Deaton says. “They supposedly follow a code, and only hunt the creatures that harm the innocent.”

“Did the Hales ever hurt anyone?”

“No.” Deaton shakes his head. “Absolutely not.”

“Kate burned their house down,” Stiles tells him.

Deaton grips the edge of the examination table tightly, and pulls in a shuddering breath, and, okay, Stiles probably could have broken that a little more gently.

“So the Argents don’t just kill bad werewolves?” Stiles asks. “They killed the Hales too.”

“It wasn’t just werewolves in that house,” Deaton says in a quiet voice. “Not that it makes any difference, but several of the Hales were human.”

“Shit,” Stiles says. And no, it doesn’t make any difference. A life is a life. But it pretty much blows Kate’s specist bullshit even further out of the water. It’s hard to consider the arson an act of moral rightness when the collateral damage included humans. Stiles can’t even imagine the dissonance reduction a person would have to employ to be able to sleep at night after something like that. But then, from what he knows about Kate, it’s probably not an issue. Stiles rubs his hand over his face. “Okay, so more of a general question. Are werewolves dangerous at the full moon?”

Deaton sighs. “You don’t have to worry about Derek. He’s a born wolf, which means he has excellent control, and he’s spent the last ten years suppressing his instincts. I suspect it’ll also take a while to work the wolfsbane out of his system. He’s not a danger to anyone in his condition.”

“Okay, sure,” Stiles says. “But what about someone who’s not a born wolf? Who was like bitten say, four days ago? Or it could be five. I’ve kind of lost track.”

Deaton’s eyes widen, and his gaze flicks to the cut on Stiles’s cheek. “Not you.”

“Asking for a friend,” Stiles agrees warily.

“Deputy, it’s very likely that your friend will lose control on the full moon. You’re going to need to contain him. Chains, a cage, and whatever you have, double it, because werewolves are incredibly strong.” Deaton frowns for a moment. “I can give you a tranquilizer gun, but werewolves metabolize any sedatives incredibly quickly.”

“I can’t shoot my friend!”

“I certainly hope it won’t come to that.” Deaton inhales deeply. “Your friend is also going to feel a pull toward the alpha who bit him. Given the alpha is a killer, I don’t need to tell you how dangerous that would be.”

Dangerous, right. Seems like an understatement, actually.

“Do the Argents know?” Deaton asks suddenly.

“What? That my friend is a werewolf? How would they—” And suddenly Stiles remembers the security cameras outside Kate’s house. Were they positioned in a way that they would have caught Scott’s eyes flashing, or his fangs appearing? And what if there were cameras inside the house that Stiles didn’t even notice? “Shit. I don’t know.”

“Tell him to watch his back,” Deaton says quietly. “And, Deputy? If he can’t control himself during the full moon, it won’t just be renegades like Kate and Gerard coming after him. It’ll be others as well.”

“Fuck,” Stiles breathes. “I am so out of my depth here.”

That actually raises a hint of a smile from the vet. “I suspect you’re doing better than you think.”

Which isn’t really much of an endorsement at all, is it?

 

***

 

Stiles drops Kylo back at Scott’s apartment, then drives out to Eichen House again. He glances at the books in the passenger footwell of the Jeep. Deaton loaned them to him. They’re old, and they’re thick, and from the quick glance Stiles gave them at the clinic, the writing is incredibly _small_. It’s going to take forever to get through them. Why must arcane wisdom always be handed down in dusty old books? Have people not heard of flash drives? Stiles would also have settled for a power point presentation and a couple of activity sheets.

His hands are aching again, but he doesn’t want to risk taking another painkiller until he’s back home. They make him dozy.

When he arrives at Eichen, he’s told that Derek’s in group, and he’ll have to wait. Stiles shows them the badge that says, no, actually, he doesn’t have to wait, and then mutters vague threats about warrants and subpoenas and charges of obstructing a police investigation until they let him in. Is it really an abuse of his power if it’s for a good reason?

Probably, yes.

Still, Stiles can have that argument with his conscience later. Much later.

Group therapy is being held in what looks like a rec room. There’s a circle of chairs in the middle of the room, each one occupied by an inmate. Wait, a _patient_. It’s not Stiles’s fault if this place is so creeptastic that he can’t help thinking in terms of Gothic horror movies, of haunted asylums, and of a time when the word ‘lunatic’ was a legit medical diagnosis.

The orderly tells him to wait at the door, and goes over to talk to the woman leading the group.

“Derek,” Stiles calls out softly.

Derek turns his head. He looks _soft_ today. He’s cleanly shaven, and his dark hair is tousled. He’s wearing sweatpants and a blue sweater. He has the cuffs of the sweater pulled over his hands.

Stiles waves him over.

The legs of Derek’s chair make a scraping sound against the floor when he stands up, and he flinches when the others notice. The woman in charge nods at him, and he heads over toward Stiles, radiating anxiety.

“Hey,” Stiles says, and draws him out into the corridor so they can talk. “How are you feeling?”

“Good,” Derek says after a moment, like he suspects it’s a trick question.

“I went and saw Alan Deaton this morning,” Stiles says, resisting the urge to reach out and touch Derek. It’s the sweater. It looks really comfy. “He told me some stuff about your family, and about werewolves. I need to know if I can trust him, Derek.”

“I don’t know,” Derek says softly. He seems to consider his answer for a long while before he shrugs his shoulders and looks at the floor. “But my mom trusted him.”

“Okay,” Stiles says, and chews on his bottom lip for a second. “Derek, is it _okay_ here?”

Derek’s green gaze meets his for a fraction of a second. “I can hear things in the basement. Bad things.”

What? Okay, because that sounds really crazy, but this place? It’s creepy as fuck. And Derek? Derek has really, _really_ good hearing.

In the rec room, some kind of commotion breaks out and Derek flinches.

“Hey,” Stiles puts his hand on Derek’s shoulder, and tries to squeeze. Pain shoots down his fingers.

Derek raises his hand and covers Stiles’s. Then he moves it from his shoulder, holding it between them. Stiles had almost forgotten how warm his touch was. He watches Derek’s face, his forehead pinched in a frown, as Derek inspects his hand. Derek’s fingers trace gently along the broken skin at his wrist, and then settle in his palm.

It feels good. Warm, and soft, just like the morphine they gave him at the hospital.

Stiles looks down. His breath catches as he sees inky tendrils climbing up the back of Derek’s hand, following the path of his veins into his wrist and forearm before vanishing.

“What the hell is that?” Stiles asks, his voice a whisper.

“Your pain,” Derek tells him.

“You’re _taking_ it? You can do that?”

Derek nods slightly.

“Holy shit,” Stiles says. “I really need to start writing this stuff down! That’s amazing. You’re amazing.”

Derek meets his gaze, and his mouth quirks up for a fraction of a second. It might be the closest thing Stiles has ever seen to a smile from him. Then he drops his gaze again.

When Stiles’s right hand doesn’t hurt anymore, Derek takes his left and repeats the process.

And why is Stiles even asking a vet questions about werewolves, when there’s one standing right here in front of him? Not just some guy who knows in theory what happens to werewolves during a full moon, but someone who’s actually gone through it? If there’s one thing Stiles has learned from all his late night research spirals—and, actually, Stiles has learned a lot of things, but that’s not the point—it’s that you should always go to the source. And Derek is the primariest of primary resources there is on werewolves, right?

And because of this place.

This miserable fucking place.

Nobody deserves to be in here.

“Derek,” he says, because spur of the moment decisions are a Stiles Stilinski special. “Let’s get you out of here, okay?”

 

***

 

The guest bedroom at Chez Stilinski isn’t much. Sure, so the curtains are a little faded, and half the closet is taken up with old board games and, for some reason, Choose Your Own Adventure books, and Stiles has to relocate a spider before the room is habitable, but it’s a million times better than Eichen House. The patchwork quilt on the bed is one that Stiles’s mom made before she got sick. Every wonky stitch reminds Stiles of how his mom told everyone how relaxing quilting was, but how, really, he’d often sneak up behind her as she worked to hear her swearing like a trucker under her breath. Stiles learned a lot of new words that way.

“Claudia?” his dad had asked one evening. “Why did Stiles just call next door’s garden gnome a motherfucker?”

“Because it’s clearly evil and can’t be trusted,” his mom had said.

Sometimes his dad looks at Stiles with an expression of such heartbreaking love, and he knows it’s not just because he looks like his mom. It’s because he’s grown into her exact same sense of humor and associated weirdness as well.

Stiles runs his fingers down the very imperfect quilt, and clears his throat. “This is your room for now, okay?”

“Okay,” Derek says quietly.

“You don’t have to stay in it or anything,” Stiles tells him. “I mean, you’re a guest.” Not a prisoner. “So you can help yourself to anything in the kitchen, or watch TV, or whatever you want. But if you want to go outside, tell me first, okay?”

With Kate and Gerard and fuckface Matt still on the loose, plus some alpha and maybe even some other hunters, it’s too dangerous for Derek to go out alone.

“I have to go to my physio appointment now,” he says worriedly. “I’ll be home as soon as I can. Will you be okay?”

“I’ll be good,” Derek tells him.

Stiles forces a smile despite the sudden chill that hits him. “Okay. I’ll see you soon.”

 

***

 

A part of Stiles expects Derek to have vanished by the time he gets home, but he finds him in the spare room, sitting on the edge of the bed and staring blankly at the wall.

“Derek?” he asks quietly.

“I was good,” Derek says woodenly.

“Yeah,” Stiles tells him, his stomach clenching. “Yeah, I know you were.”

 

 


	8. Chapter 8

John isn’t happy when he arrives home to find out Stiles has signed Derek out of Eichen House. He clenches his jaw, and uses his thumb to rub at the furrow that appears between his eyebrows when he frowns. Stiles hasn't seen that particular look since high school. 

“Jesus, kid,” he says at last. “Is it _safe_?”

As far as Stiles is concerned, the word has lost all meaning. He only shrugs, and doesn’t realize until later that he doesn’t know if his dad meant safe for Derek, or safe for them.

Stiles lies awake in bed that night, afraid that every time he closes his eyes he’ll see Kate smiling back at him.

_Cutie pie._

He thinks of how she laughed while she used the knife to trace narrow ribbons of blood between the moles on his torso. And it had hurt, sure, but the anticipation had been the worst. The thought that any second now she’d grow bored with making him whimper and thrash, and plunge the blade deep into his body.

The cuts were shallow. They don’t hurt anymore. They itch like hell, but they don’t hurt.

So he got off easy, right? He probably won’t even have any scars in a little while. Easy.

So why can’t he sleep?

It’s like he hasn’t given himself a chance to stop and think since he and Derek got out of the basement. In the hospital he was too physically tired to do anything except doze and eat pudding. And afterward, shit, there were things he had to _do_. But now it’s the middle of the night, and there’s nothing but hours and hours of darkness stretching out until it’s dawn, and Stiles can’t stop _thinking_. He can’t even blame this on his ADD. No, Stiles has a feeling this is a whole other set of letters entirely.

He stares at his ceiling and thinks of his Glock, stored in the safe in his dad’s study. A part of him wonders if he’d feel safer if it was under his pillow right now. The other, still rational part of him knows that if he tried to shoot an intruder if would turn out to be his dad walking upstairs to bed. The statistics don’t lie.

Eventually Stiles climbs out of bed and opens one of Deaton’s books.

Yep, that does the trick.

Four paragraphs of cramped, weirdly-slanted writing that’s in some form of weird ass English Stiles can barely read, and he’s slumped over his desk snoring.

He wakes up hours later with a crick in his neck, throbbing pain across his shoulders, and the realization that his physio is probably going to punch him in the face for falling asleep in that position in the first place.

He moves back to his bed, and checks his phone for messages. There are none, because it’s four in the morning and normal people are asleep right now.

He stares at his collection of action figures on the top of his bookshelf.

Possessions.

Things.

Stiles has always clung to them. More than is normal probably. More than is healthy, absolutely. He’s not a hoarder, nowhere near it, but it’s not impossible to imagine that he could become one. Months after his mom died, Stiles threw a massive tantrum when John cleaned out her closet at last. He couldn’t bear the thought of not keeping every little thing that she’d once touched, any more than John could bear the thought of having to see them every single day. The compromised by storing everything up in the attic. When Stiles was younger he used to stare at his bedroom ceiling and wonder if the weight of all his grief, tied up so deeply in her dresses and her shoes and her pillow and her notebooks and all the detritus of a life cut short, would make the ceiling collapse. If it would bring the entire house crumbling down and bury him in the rubble.

When he was eight, all he had left of his mom were _things_. Hollow things, but Stiles imbued them with as much meaning as he could. Turned them into sacred objects in his mind and worshiped them in secret.

And somehow he did the same with his action figures and his comic books and his _stuff_. Anything that gave him a flicker of pleasure, he needed to own, needed to hold onto as tightly as he could so nobody could rip it away.

He thinks of Derek, losing everything in the fire. People, possessions, and the house itself. What’s Derek got to hold onto, apart from ashes?

Jesus.

What is it about four in the morning that creates all these weird fucking byways for his brain to get lost in?

Stiles frowns at his bookshelf for a little while longer, then goes downstairs to get a trash bag.

 

***

 

“Are you sure, Stiles?” his dad asks him in the morning, turning an action figure over his hands.

“Yep,” Stiles tells him. “Take it all to Goodwill.”

“But you love this weird little red guy.”

“That would be Deadpool,” Stiles tells him. “And I can still love him without having the action figure.”

“Your comics too?” John asks, peering into the trash bag.

“Not _all_ of them,” Stiles says, because baby steps. And also, some of them are worth a shit ton of money.

“Okay,” John says, hefting the trash bag up. “If you’re sure.”

“I’m sure,” Stiles tells him, and watches his dad cart half his childhood out the door.

It feels okay.

 

***

 

Derek is not okay.

He spends most of his time in his room, sitting quietly, and Stiles can’t help wondering exactly how long it takes to carve a person out into a hollow shell like that. What _precision_ it must take.

Stiles isn’t good with quiet. He never has been. Quiet is the same as those middle-of-the-night hours, when waves of doubt and grief and fear all hit over and over again. Stiles doesn’t know how Derek can stand it. But he also knows he can’t push.

He makes sure that Derek comes downstairs for meals, and encourages him to watch TV on the couch for a while afterward. And sometimes, when they pass in the hallway, Derek reaches out and takes Stiles’s hands and bleeds the pain away. Even as Stiles’s hands heal over the next few days, when the black lines become gray lines become hardly anything at all, Stiles lets Derek take his pain.

He smiles at Derek the day that Derek gets nothing. “They hardly hurt at all now. I just get pins and needles a lot. Look.” He waggles his fingers in Derek’s face. “Almost as good as new.”

Derek’s answering smile is tentative, and fucking beautiful.

Scott is still weirded out by the whole situation.

“I’m still weirded out by the whole situation,” he tells Stiles when he visits after work one afternoon, and then throws an apologetic look in Derek’s direction. “Sorry, Derek. It’s nothing personal. Just _grrr_.”

Derek raises his eyebrows at him.

“I think Scott’s having another existential crisis,” Stiles tells him.

“I’m pretty sure it’s the same one,” Scott says. “It just keeps coming around for another hit. Just this whole _werewolf_ thing, you know? It’s huge.”

Stiles is pretty sure he doesn’t know. And neither does Derek, really, since Derek was born a werewolf and it surely came as natural to him as breathing.

“It’s like getting _worse_ ,” Scott says with a sigh, “not better. I’m like itchy or something. I spent an hour on the treadmill last night, and I still wanted to climb the walls when I was done. I can’t _relax_.”

“It’s the moon,” Derek says quietly. “It’s coming up to full moon. The wolf wants to shift.”

“Is there any way to control it?” Scott asks hopefully.

“You have to be stronger than the animal,” Derek tells him. “When you lose control of your emotions, you lose control of the wolf and you’ll shift. Shifting is—”

“Not ideal,” Stiles breaks in quickly before he can finish the thought, “for a first timer.”

Derek looks at him warily, but doesn’t contradict him. Stiles is going to count that as a win.

“We need some immersion therapy,” Stiles decides.

Which is how they end up in the back yard with Stiles lobbing balls directly at Scott’s face.

“Don’t give into your anger,” Stiles wheezes though a laugh, leaning on his lacrosse stick for support. “Don’t choose the dark side, Scotty!”

Scott legit _growls_ at him as another ball smacks him in the chest.

This is the most fun he’s had since the entire _grrr_ situation began. Even Derek, sitting on the steps of the back porch, seems to be almost smiling. Okay, not smiling, but whenever Stiles turns around to look at him, he’s not shrinking back and cringing like he so often does. For once he seems to be almost filling the space he occupies, and not trying to disappear.

“I don’t think this is working,” Scott says, as a lacrosse ball hits him in the head. “Ow. Dude, I think you really are going to have to chain me up on full moon.”

“Yeah,” Stiles agrees.

“Shit, I think I’m on night shift too. Your dad’s going to have to change the roster, or I’ll have to take a sick day.” Scott scoops the ball up and tosses it back to Stiles. “I don’t want to waste my sick days being chained up! What if I actually get sick?”

“You won’t,” Derek says suddenly. “You can’t.”

“Really?” Scott raises his eyebrows and looks tentatively pleased. “Like, from anything?”

“Not from diseases.”

“Wow,” Scott says. “That’s kind of cool, right?”

“We really need to start writing this stuff down, Scotty,” Stiles tells him, and flashes a smile at Derek. “Thanks, Der.”

Derek ducks his head, and reaches up to scratch the back of his neck. The gesture is so nervous, so human, so _young_ , that it floods Stiles with warmth. Yeah there’s a person inside of Derek Hale still, and Stiles is going to get him out of there.

 

***

 

Everything is different at night. All Stiles’s old fears and insecurities find him, and they bring along a bunch of new friends just to jab incessantly at his brain and keep him from sleeping. When he does doze off he wakes less than an hour later from a nightmare starring Kate fucking Argent.

He’d dreamed she was in the house, and Stiles tried to scream for help but no sound came out.

He lies awake and stares at the window she climbed through in the dream. He doesn’t sleep with it open anymore.

Can’t.

He rubs his eyes, stinging with grit, and thinks back to what his dad told him over dinner. That Matt’s car was found dumped in Chula Vista, south of San Diego, with nobody inside. That Kate and Gerard Argent haven’t touched their bank accounts, like they’ve vanished off the face of the earth. Except while Stiles is sure they want the department to imagine them sunning themselves on some Mexican beach, Stiles doesn’t believe it for a second. Neither does his dad. His dad has someone watching Chris Argent too, but apparently he’s just been going about his business like a law-abiding citizen. Stiles doesn’t know whether he believes that or not, to be honest.

Mostly, he thinks that sure, Matt Daehler could be fucking anywhere—and if it’s at the bottom of a ditch, that would be great—but the Argents? Stiles didn’t get much of a read on the old man, but he can’t imagine Kate leaving just like that. Not when she’s got her hooks so far in Derek. Not when every smile of hers was about how much she was enjoying _winning_. Keeping him like a puppy on a chain. Gloating about it. No, Kate Argent isn’t the sort of woman who’s going to cut her losses when it comes to Derek. She’s going to want to punish him for standing up for Stiles.

Eventually Stiles pushes himself up from his mattress and goes to the bathroom. Derek’s door is ajar, and Stiles pauses outside for a moment and listens.

He hears ragged breathing.

He hesitates before pushing the door open. “Derek?”

The bed is empty. In the gloom, Stiles makes out the vague shape of Derek kneeling on the floor beside the window.

“Derek?”

Blue flashes as Derek looks up.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m sorry,” Derek whispers. “Kate, I’m sorry.”

Stiles steps forward into the room, his stomach clenching. He doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t know how to tell Derek not to be sorry for standing up to Kate, and for hurting her. Because saying what he really thinks, that she’s an evil bitch and it’s only a shame he didn’t kill her, is not the way to help Derek. Stiles is afraid he doesn’t know the way.

He slides down the wall and lands on his ass beside Derek. Bumps their shoulders together. Then he reaches out and takes Derek’s hand, and holds it in his own. Derek’s eyes flash blue again as Stiles runs the pads of his fingers over his palm.

“What are you doing?” Derek asks after a moment.

Stiles traces his fingers in a circular pattern. “It made me feel better when you did this for me.”

“You can’t take pain though.” There’s something soft and hopeful in Derek’s tone.

“No,” Stiles agrees. “But that’s not the only reason it felt good when you did it.”

He thinks he sees the corner of Derek’s mouth lift slightly in the gloom, but he’s unsure if it’s his imagination, or if it was too ephemeral to catch.

Stiles leans his head back against the wall and closes his eyes. He keeps rubbing Derek’s palm. “God. This past week has been insane. You know what’s dumb?” He knows better than to wait for an answer. “When I was a kid, I used to get so frustrated because everything was boring, and nothing ever happened, and how come none of the stories I read were real? Like why couldn’t I get bitten by a radioactive spider, Derek, why?”

Derek huffs slightly.

Stiles thinks back to that moment in the basement, when Derek was on top of him pawing at him. When Stiles had been terrified he was going to hurt him. He doesn’t quite understand how comfortable it is to sit here beside him now, how strangely safe it feels. Because logically he knows that it wasn’t exactly Derek assaulting him--it was Kate, using Derek as her means--but it confuses him a little that the fear just isn’t there.

He runs his thumb along one of the lines on Derek’s palm. The heart line? A girl Stiles hooked up with once claimed to be able to read palms. Stiles isn’t saying that’s why he never called her for a second date, but come on. Palm reading?

In retrospect, maybe not as crazy as Stiles had assumed, because apparently there are no rules now.

“Spiderman is probably a bad example,” Stiles tells Derek. “He was never my favorite. I loved Batman more. But, you know, he had an origin story I was already a little too familiar with, so no thanks.”

Derek exhales slowly.

“I’m talking too much, aren’t I?”

“I like it.”

“You are literally the first person who’s ever told me that,” Stiles says with a smile. “So I guess I spent ages wishing for something bigger, some adventure. I was like Luke, stuck on Tatooine, complaining whenever Uncle Owen wanted me to go pick up some power converters.”

“Or waiting for an owl to deliver your acceptance letter to Hogwarts,” Derek murmurs.

Stiles laughs, and opens his eyes. “Dude! You’re a Harry Potter fan?”

“Cora was.” Derek’s fingers twitch as Stiles touches them. “My mom refused to buy her and Matty, our little brother, a copy each of the books. So every night, even though they were too old for it, Mom would read a chapter aloud. That way they couldn’t fight over whose turn it was to read the book.”

Stiles squeezes his hand.

“Laura and I used to listen too. The whole pack did.” Derek’s voice breaks a little on those words, and neither of them speak again. There doesn’t seem to be anything to say. Stiles keeps his eyes closed, and concentrates on the warmth of Derek’s hand in his own.

He falls asleep like that, hands curled around Derek’s, and his head resting on Derek’s shoulder.

 

***

 

Stiles stirs when the light hits him in the face. He blinks awake, and it takes him a moment to realize he’s not in his own bed. He’s in Derek’s room, in Derek’s bed, and apparently Stiles is the little spoon. Derek is warm though, and the bed is comfortable, so Stiles decides to save the freak out for later, and, for now, just sink back into the sleep that’s eluded him for almost a week now.

Derek’s breath tickles a little against the shell of Stiles’s ear.

It’s warm though.

Against his back, Stiles can feel Derek’s heart beating. It drums him gently back into sleep.


	9. Chapter 9

The full moon is only days away.

As the nights grow brighter they feel, perversely, more oppressive. Stiles sits on the couch with Derek, both of them resting their feet on the coffee table, and watches the silver moonlight seep in between the living room curtains.

Stiles has never before hated the inevitability of the lunar cycle. Now he wishes there was some lever he could jam in the universe to stop the planet from spinning, just until he’s sure they’re ready.

“Are there werewolves in space?” he asks aloud one night. “Like, okay, obviously there aren’t, but if you got sent through a Stargate into another galaxy, would you still be tied to our lunar cycle, do you think? Or would you synch up with some totally different moon? Or maybe you’d just be like a human there or something.”

Derek gives him a weird look.

“I mean, the _moon_ ,” Stiles says. “It’s very Earth specific.”

Derek picks up the remote control and changes channels.

“That was an important philosophical question about the nature of your existence, you know,” Stiles says, and elbows him. “Wait! What if there were _two_ moons? Or more?”

Derek huffs.

Derek likes the National Geographic channel. Stiles isn’t sure if that’s because he’s a wolf, or just because the National Geographic channel is awesome. Because it is. Stiles likes to narrate everything in a David Attenborough voice, even if David Attenborough is already narrating. _Especially_ if David Attenborough is already narrating. Stiles particularly likes the way that Derek almost-smiles at him when he does it, and doesn’t flinch away when Stiles leans on him. Stiles isn’t actually that touchy-feely with many people—his dad and Scott are, as always, the exception to the rule—but Derek always seems to unfurl a little when Stiles leans against him, and Stiles wonders if he’s been touch-starved all these years.

And so what if they both sleep better in the same bed?

“Because you both need to develop coping strategies that aren’t co-dependant,” John tells him one morning before heading into work.

Which, yeah, okay, but right now the thought of sleeping alone at night makes panic flare inside of Stiles. Which is exactly what his dad is worrying about exacerbating, probably, because at some point he and Derek are going to have to learn to untangle themselves, but not now though, right? Neither of them is ready for it now. Not with the Argents still out there.

Stiles is worried about the Argents.

He’s worried about the full moon.

He’s worried about going back to work soon and leaving Derek alone all day.

He needs a _project_.

With four days to go until the full moon, Stiles convinces Derek to join him on a trip to the hardware store. Derek is wary at first, but relaxes a little as they drive through town. He even seems to take an interest in the scenery flashing past the windows.

When Stiles was little, the hardware store was a Mom and Pop kind of place on Main Street. That’s long gone. Now the local hardware store is a massive soulless Lowe’s, out on the highway. The parking lot alone is large enough to require a map and compass.

Once they’re inside, Stiles grabs a cart.

“Okay, so Scotty can’t chain himself up at his place, or at his mom’s,” he tells Derek. He pushes the cart, then leans on it and lifts his feet up to try and catch a ride. The cart heads sharply for a stack of paint cans, so Stiles straightens up again before he causes a disaster. “Mostly because at his place the walls are paper thin, and he can’t go to Melissa’s, because he still hasn’t told her what’s going on. So I guess it’ll have to be our basement. And I’m really hoping you’ll be able to tell me what kind of chains and stuff would be good, because I’m scared if I ask a friendly staff member, it’ll sound like I’m trying to build a sex dungeon.”

Derek snorts.

“I do actually have a reputation to maintain in town though,” Stiles says, “and I’d rather that didn’t hinge on my being Kinky Cop or whatever.”

“Deputy Dominant?” Derek shoots back.

Stiles bursts out laughing. “That’s it! That’s the one they’d use!”

Derek’s mouth twitches up in a smile.

They find the aisle with the chains, and Stiles shoos the assistant away.

“So Deaton said Scott would be a lot stronger,” Stiles says, hefting a length of chain in his hand. “This feels pretty strong.”

Derek checks it as well, and shakes his head. “He could break that.”

“Seriously?” They move on to the next spool of chain. “What about this one?”

“You need something that’s Grade 100 at least,” Derek tells him, checking further down the aisle.

Chains have grades?

They settle on a bright blue chain that is apparently Grade 120, and move on to the more excruciating task of finding padlocks, bolts, and heavy-duty tie down D-Rings. Which is right where Chris Argent finds them.

The first thing Stiles registers is Derek’s suddenly stiffening posture.

The next thing is the chattering voice of a young woman, a sound that Stiles had only been vaguely aware of, coming to an abrupt halt.

Stiles looks up sharply in time to see Chris Argent and a really cute brunette standing a few feet away from them. This is one of those times that Stiles wishes he’d brought his Glock.

“Deputy,” Chris says, his gaze flicking immediately to Derek.

“Mr. Argent.” Stiles straightens his shoulders, and makes sure Derek is safely behind him.

Awkward silence.

“This is my daughter,” Chris says at last. “Allison.”

She puts her hand out. Stiles doesn’t.

“This is Stiles Stilinski,” Chris says. “And Derek Hale.”

Allison’s eyes widen, and she drops her hand quickly. Stiles almost has the impression it’s not because she thinks he’s scum or anything, but because she’s pretty damn sure she knows he thinks _she_ is. But he might be reading the situation all wrong, because that kind of empathy from an Argent? Yeah no.

“It’s good to see you out and about again,” Chris says at last.

Stiles doesn’t even bother answer that. He just stares at them both until Chris takes Allison by the elbow and steers her back the way they came.

Stiles is half afraid it’ll cause Derek to relapse. Not that he has very far to relapse. He’s hardly come out of his shell at all, really. But when he turns around to check that Derek’s not a cowering mess on the floor, he’s surprised, and gratified, to see that Derek has mirrored his straight-shouldered I’m-not-going-to-take-any-bullshit stance.

Actually, he’s a lot better at it than Stiles.

“Let’s get out of here,” Stiles says. “I could really use a vanilla frappe.”

 

 

***

 

Something in the vanilla frappe must loosen Derek’s tongue, because it’s under that sweet sugary influence that he tells Stiles about mountain ash, and how it acts as a barrier against werewolves and a bunch of other supernatural creatures.

First of all, _other_ supernatural creatures? Stiles isn’t ready for that.

But second of all, he knows what Derek’s just offered him and it’s not just information. It’s power. Because Stiles could probably never get the drop on Derek long enough to put him in the chains they just bought—not that he ever _would_ —but he could absolutely imprison him with a line of ash.

And Derek trusts him enough to tell him about it anyway.

 

***

 

“Deputy,” Alan Deaton says. “No cat this time?”

“No,” Stiles admits.

Deaton’s expression softens into something sorrowful as he catches sight of Derek lurking behind Stiles. “Derek. It’s good to see you. How are you feeling?”

“Good,” Derek says in his usual monotone.

Deaton steps toward him.

They do something weird and complicated. What starts as a handshake ends with Deaton putting his hand lightly on Derek’s shoulder, wrist turned inward, and Derek turning his head so that he almost bumps his nose against Deaton’s pulse point. Derek inhales deeply, his chest expanding, and then seems to relax. He stays like that for a moment and then nods slightly, and Deaton removes his hand.

“We need some mountain ash,” Stiles says. “For the full moon.”

“For your friend?” Deaton asks.

Stiles nods.

“I’m glad you came by,” Deaton says. “I was going to drop some off to you after work, actually. Has Derek explained how it works?”

“Not how it works,” Stiles says. “But he explained what it does.”

Deaton actually smiles. “Yes, well. I suppose nobody really knows how it works.”

Stiles is starting to feel that way about pretty much everything in the universe, actually.

“Thanks,” he says when Deaton presents him with a jar of what looks just like regular ash. “What do I owe you?”

“Nothing,” Deaton tells him. “This is my responsibility as Hale pack emissary.”

 

***

 

“An emissary knows magic,” Derek tells him later as they’re working to get the basement ready. He’s covered in cement dust. “Wolves don’t do magic.”

“Magic is a thing too?” Stiles tugs on the D-Ring they’ve fixed to the wall. It seems strong enough to hold pretty much anything, but what does he know?

“Magic is a thing,” Derek confirms. “The mountain ash is magic.”

“I thought you were just like allergic or something. Like with wolfsbane?”

“No. It creates a physical barrier.” Derek tests the pull of a chain. “Emissaries are also like diplomats. They help negotiate between packs.”

“Negotiate what?” Stiles asks.

“Treaties,” Derek says with a shrug. “Alliances. Sometimes marriages.”

“Woah. You guys have arranged marriages?”

“Not sight unseen or anything,” Derek says. “But if you met someone from another pack you wanted to marry, then their alpha and your alpha would have to approve. That’s where the emissaries come in. And if you wanted to marry a human, the emissary would be the one who had to check out if they…” He trails off.

“If they what?” Stiles asks.

“If they could be trusted.” Derek’s expression goes blank.

Stiles sets the power drill down. “Der?”

“Kate never wanted to meet with Deaton.”

Stiles’s stomach clenches. “You wanted to marry her?”

“I love…” Derek swallows. “I loved her. It’s all my fault.”

“It’s not,” Stiles tells him. “I mean, I don’t know if you want to talk about it or not, but I can guarantee you it’s not your fault.”

“I told her our secret.” Derek closes his eyes.

“Derek.” Stiles put his hand on his shoulder the way Deaton did back at the clinic, and Derek turns his face toward his wrist. “Derek, she already knew you were a werewolf, right? Because her family hunts them. You didn’t tell her anything she didn’t already know. She just used you to get close, and that’s not your fault.”

“I told her about the tunnels under the house.” Derek’s voice hitches.

“The tunnels?”

“So we could get out if anyone ever attacked.” Derek raises his hand and curls his fingers around Stiles’s wrist. “I told her about them and she blocked them with mountain ash. Then she burned everyone alive.”

Stiles has seen the reports, ever since his dad has reopened the case. The tunnels, everyone figured, had been left over from bootlegging days. A cool piece of history in a very old house. And, for whatever reason, the Hales had tried to use them to escape, except the exits were all locked, and probably had been for years. It hadn’t occurred to anyone that the Hales had been intentionally trapped down there.

And everyone had died.

Everyone except Derek, who had unwittingly betrayed his family, and Laura.

Guilt prickles Stiles’s skin.

How the hell could he forget?

And Peter. Peter Hale.

“Derek,” he says. “Did you know your uncle is still alive?”

Derek’s sudden sharp sob is all the answer he needs.

 

***

 

Visiting Peter Hale in the long term care ward of the Beacon Hills Memorial Hospital might be Stiles’s worst idea yet. Clearly Derek is hoping for a miracle. And clearly he’s not going to get one. Because while Peter Hale is alive, he’s also catatonic. He sits slightly slumped over in a wheelchair, eyes open but unseeing. Half his face is a mask of shiny puckered scars.

Derek immediately drops to the floor in front of him, and buries his face in the blanket covering his uncle’s knees. “Peter? Peter?”

Now would be the perfect time for Peter to lift his hand and rest it against his crying nephew’s head, to tousle his hair gently and blink himself back into the real world.

But of course nothing like that happens.

Nothing happens at all.

 

***

 

“Is Derek okay?” John asks after dinner that night, after Derek escapes upstairs as soon as he can.

Stiles looks up from the file on the Hale house fire. He flinches guiltily under his dad’s stern expression, and scrubs a hand through his hair. “I took him to the hospital today, to see Peter. I think it made it worse.”

“Can’t have been easy seeing him like that.”

“You’ve seen him?”

“I check in, every now and then,” John admits. “It’s been a few months though.”

“How do you check in with someone who’s checked out?” Stiles asks, and then feels a sudden stab of sick realization. He remembers his dad used to visit his mom every day too, right up until the end. Long after she even knew who the hell he was.

“I visit for a few minutes,” John says. “Tell him about the weather. How the Giants are doing.”

The rest goes unsaid, but Stiles hears it anyway. His dad has been letting Peter Hale know he hasn’t been totally forgotten.

John sighs. “I was the one who pulled him out that night. Did I ever tell you that? I was sure he’d be dead before they got him to hospital, with burns like his. Of course, I didn’t know he was a werewolf. I guess that has something to do with the fact he survived.”

Stiles taps a finger against a floor plan of the Hale house, where the fire investigator has marked where the electrical fault started the whole thing. Electrical fault. Stiles squints at the name on the plan. Garrison Myers. Well, Garrison Myers is clearly a fucking idiot. “Derek said the tunnels were an escape route in case anyone ever attacked the pack. Kate locked them and sealed everyone in before she started the fire. She knew about the tunnels from Derek.”

“Jesus,” John sighs.

“He thinks it’s his fault.”

“Not much you can do about that,” John says. “Except keep reminding him it’s not.”

“Yeah.” Stiles makes a face. “Hey, Derek, totally not your fault, and also let’s go and see your burned and catatonic uncle, m’kay?”

John rubs his forehead. “Yeah, you probably could have handled it a little better.”

“Story of my fucking life.”

“Language,” John says mildly.

Stiles clears his throat and closes the file. “Anything on Kate and Gerard?”

His dad shakes his head.

“Matt?”

John’s expression hardens. “Nope.”

Stiles smiles slightly. Matt’s going to be in a world of hurt when John catches up with him. John takes his job very seriously, and Matt’s betrayal personally. Not that he also wouldn’t pistol-whip the fuck out of Kate and Gerard too, of course. Papa Bear can get fucking angry with the right motivation.

When Stiles was eleven he got in a fight at school. Well, fight is overstating it. What happened was he got ambushed by a bunch of older kids who called him bad words and smashed his head into a locker. The thing is, Stiles wasn’t even sure what those words meant when he was eleven, let alone that they would ever apply to him. Stiles wasn’t one of those kids who was born knowing he liked boys in _that_ way, so how could those kids tell? Stiles doesn’t think they could, really. It was just their go-to insult for the weird kid they didn’t like. And fuck them anyway. Stiles isn’t gay. He’s bi. Which is an academic distinction when it comes to homophobia, but hey, Stiles didn’t write the guidebook on how to be an asshole.

Anyway, his dad had come barreling down to the school, took one look at Stiles’s busted nose and bloodstained shirt, and gone absolutely _ballistic_. It had been kind of awesome. Three out of the four bullies had been in tears in seconds. The fourth one had gone non-verbal, and actually wet himself. Stiles counts the entire experience as a win.

“Look, kiddo,” his dad had said after they got back home. “I’m not proud of how I acted today, but—”

“I am!” Stiles had declared, and flung himself into his dads’s arms.

His dad has always had his back.

Mostly.

There was a period after his mom’s death that John wasn’t really there for him. A period when he sank a little too far into a bottle of whiskey—a new bottle every day—but Stiles has forgiven him for that. Hell, if he’d been old enough to drink he probably would have drunk himself into a stupor every night as well.

But even at John’s lowest point, Stiles never doubted that his dad loved him. Just that, for a little while, he was lost. And Stiles had sworn with all the fierce determination of his eight years, that he was going to get his dad back.

He feels an echo of that now.

He’s going to get Derek back.

“We’ll find them, Dad,” he says. “We’ll figure this out.”

“I know we will, kid,” John says. “I know we will.”

Team Stilinski for the win.

 

***

 

He and Derek don’t talk about it.

Stiles just slips into Derek’s room in the middle of the night and slides under the covers with him. He lets Derek’s warmth draw him into sleep.

It’s not so scary in the middle of the night as long as he’s not alone.

 


	10. Chapter 10

It’s the middle of the night when Stiles is woken by the blast of the chorus of _Scott’s a Dork_ by Reel Big Fish. He fumbles for his phone in the darkness, wondering when he made the decision to bring it, and his own pillow, and the book he’s reading, into Derek’s room. Kind of hard to pretend this is a split decision he makes in the middle of every night, when his stuff is slowly migrating in here.

Stiles brings the phone up to his ear, the soft glow of the screen illuminating the planes of Derek’s face as he does. “’lo?”

“Stiles!” Scott’s voice is sharp, frantic. His breath is ragged, like he’s on the edge of a panic attack and about to tip over into the abyss. Stiles knows that feeling all too well. “Stiles, I don’t know where I am!”

Stiles sits bolt upright, his chest constricting. “What do you mean you don’t know where you are?”

“I’m in the woods!” Scott is panting for breath.

“What the hell are you doing there?”

“I don’t _know_!”

Stiles tumbles out of bed. “Are you hurt?”

“No! It’s like I just woke up here, except I wasn’t asleep in the first place. I was watching TV, then all of a sudden everything went weird and red, and now I’m here!”

Scott sounds scared. Stiles has been his friend for most of his life. He can tell when it’s the real thing, when it’s bone deep. Like the time Scott was still learning to swim, and one of the kids at the pool pushed him in the deep end. Or the time things got really bad at home, and he’d whispered to Stiles at school the next day that he’d hidden under his bed and listened to his dad hit his mom. Right now Scott sounds like that frightened little kid again, eyes big while he tried uselessly to explain something that made no sense to either of them.

“I’m coming, Scotty,” Stiles says, hurrying down the hallway toward his room.

Jeans and shoes and car keys.

Scott’s breathing is thin and high-pitched.

“Just keep your phone on you and I’ll be able to find you,” Stiles tells him, wrenching a jacket awkwardly over the ancient Stud Muffin t-shirt he sleeps in. He hurries out of his room and down the stairs, registering that Derek is dressed too, and following close behind him.

He flicks the light on in his dad’s study, and goes for the gun safe. It’s a combination lock, and Stiles’s fingers tremble as he fucks it up at least twice before getting it right. The gun safe is empty except for his dad’s old army piece, which Stiles doesn’t think has seen the light of day during his lifetime, and Stiles’s Glock.

Stiles jams his Glock down the waistband of his jeans, because he hasn’t got time to fuck around with his holster. His dad always rolls his eyes when he sees people carry handguns like that in movies.

“You know what that is?” he’ll ask. “A good way to ensure you never father any children.”

“Sorry you never tried it?” Stiles usually asks back.

“Every day, kiddo,” his dad lies with a grin.

John is working late tonight. With Matt on the lam and Stiles out sick, and way too many major investigations intersecting around the Hales, John hasn’t worked this many hours since he was a lowly deputy. The dark circles under his eyes are another reason Stiles wants to get this whole shit fight sorted out sooner rather than later. His dad needs a break.

“You okay, Scotty?” Stiles asks.

“Y-yeah. Losing my fucking mind though.”

“You hang in there, bro. I’m on my way.”

Derek follows him silently toward the front door.

“You sure about this, big guy?” Stiles asks him, shifting the phone away from his ear for just a second.

Derek doesn’t even hesitate. “Yes.”

And that’s when they hear it. The thin, distant sound echoing through Stiles’s phone. And it might be only the faintest echo of the real thing, and it might be actual miles away, but Stiles’s blood runs cold when he hears the howl.

“Holy shit,” Scott whispers into the phone when Stiles lifts it to his ear again. “Is that what I think it is?”

Derek’s eyes flash blue.

It can only be the _alpha_.

 

***

 

Stiles breaks a whole bunch of traffic laws getting to the Preserve. He almost drives off the road and straight into a tree while trying to squint at the map in the Find My Friends app, and only Derek’s literal warning growl makes him look up in time to avoid the collision. Stiles doesn’t know the Preserve itself very well, or the labyrinth of crisscrossing fire trails that cut through it. He’s a little surprised when the map directs him away from the direction of the public parking lot at the edge of the Preserve, and onto a secondary road that heads east.

The town limits end where the asphalt does, Stiles guesses, and the road becomes dirt.

“Oh shit,” he says, when he realizes exactly where they’re headed.

When the Jeep roars past a ‘Private Property’ sign that’s standing an odd angle, like nobody’s bothered prop it up in years.

They’re headed for the Hale house.

 

***

 

When Stiles and Scott were about thirteen, the tragedy of the Hale fire was distant enough that nobody talked about it much anymore, but still close enough that most people avoided the site of the fire. Stiles and Scott rode their bikes out there one weekend, buzzing with the thrill of doing something their parents would definitely not approve of, and with the fear of being caught.

They were going to look for clues. Clues about the people who had lived there, and how they’d died. Stiles, at that age, had liked knowing his dad had never felt right that the fire was written off as an accident. The secret knowledge felt dangerous and exciting, and Stiles had read enough books about kid investigators to just _know_ that he and Scott were going to crack the case right open. Except, when they’d got to the site of the house, it suddenly hadn’t seemed like an exciting adventure at all. They’d looked at the blackened frame of the Hale house, made fragile and unsafe by the fire, and suddenly remembered that eight people had _died_ there.

It wasn’t fun anymore.

Stiles shifts the Jeep into a lower gear as the road curves. He feels sick with anticipation. Scott, the alpha, the Hale house, and _Derek_. Apart from Gerard Argent’s basement, it’s kind of hard to think of a _worse_ place to bring Derek.

He’s almost relieved when they round the bend, and spot the figure standing in the middle of the road. Stiles slams on the brakes.

“Scotty?” Stiles asks the figure caught in the headlights of the Jeep. “Dude?”

Scott turns. He’s wolfed out: the Neanderthal brow, the hard core sideburns, the fangs. His eyes are the most arresting though. They shine bright gold.

Stiles fumbles with his door.

“No.” Derek reaches out and pulls his arm back. “Wait.”

Derek climbs out of the Jeep instead, and approaches Scott slowly.

This is exactly like the National Geographic channel, actually. If it got drunk and made out with SyFy. Point is, Scott and Derek regard one another warily, noses lifting into the air like wild animals. Scott growls, and Derek makes a movement with his shoulders that’s not quite defensive, but seems like an acknowledgement of Scott’s presence. Hell if Stiles knows, honestly. There are a lot more nuances at play here than he can judge.

Derek doesn’t shift, but his eyes flash blue.

And then Scott suddenly seems to sag. His shoulder slump and he bows he head. When he straightens up again, there’s not trace of the wolf in his features.

Stiles barrels out of the car. “Scotty?”

“What the fuck is going on?” Scott asks. He looks almost distraught.

“The alpha called you here,” Derek tells him quietly.

“How?” Scott demands.

“You have a bond.”

Great. Like Scott doesn’t have enough complicated daddy issues without throwing a murderous supernatural sire into the mix. Stiles remembers that Deaton said it would happen, that Scott would be drawn to the alpha despite himself.

“Can he just _do_ that?” Scott asks.

“No,” Stiles says firmly. “Scott, you’re an independent werewolf who don’t need no alpha, okay?”

It earns him a weird look from Derek and a shaky smile from Scott, so Stiles is going to count it as a win. He’s also going to have to get Derek up to speed on memes.

“What does he want though?” Scott asks.

Derek stares into the dark tree line. “Pack?”

Around them, the wind lifts the leaves and settles them again in a restless cycle as endless as the tides. The air smells like earth and pine and damp. Now that his fear has worn off, Stiles feels the bite of the cold night air. He’s not the only one.

Scott shivers. He’s only wearing his sleep pants and a thin t-shirt. Stiles shrugs his jacket off and passes it over to him, and Scott puts it on with a grateful look. “Thanks, bro.”

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Stiles says, and they head for the Jeep.

 

***

 

The public parking lot on the eastern side of the Preserve isn’t the best place for teens to park and make out. Clearly that’s the lookout, on the northern side of the Preserve. Yet, when they’ve headed out onto the main road again and are passing the parking lot, Stiles sees the black SUV pulled in. The headlights turn off as they pass.

Stiles exchanges a look with Scott, and turns the Jeep around.

He and Scott aren’t in uniform, but also, they can’t just ignore some suspicious vehicle in the parking lot in the middle of the night, right? There’s no such thing as off duty, not really. Especially not in a small town like Beacon Hills.

When they pull into the parking lot and the lights of the Jeep hit the SUV, the driver’s door opens and Chris Argent steps out. He’s looking very Special Ops tonight. Lots of black. He’s also holding some sort of high-powered rifle.

“Oh, great,” Stiles mutters. He climbs out of the Jeep, with Scott and Derek behind him.

“Mr. Argent,” he says.

Chris’s gaze drops to his Stud Muffin shirt. “Deputy Stilinski.”

The passenger door of the SUV opens as well, and Allison Argent climbs out. She’s carrying a crossbow.

“I take it you’ve got permits for all of those?” Stiles asks.

“We do,” Chris says.

“Do you often head out to the Preserve in the middle of the night with enough firepower to take down the world’s biggest deer?”

“It’s not a crime to hunt, Deputy.”

“Depends what you’re hunting,” Stiles points out.

Chris’s mouth quirks. “I could ask what you’re doing out here.”

“You could,” Stiles says, “but you’re not a cop, so we actually don’t have to tell you now, do we?”

Chris Argent’s gaze switches suddenly to Scott. To his sleep pants and bare feet. Something in his expression sharpens. “You don’t look dressed for the woods.”

“Deputy McCall’s a sleepwalker,” Stiles lies.

Chris actually smiles at that, and shakes his head a little ruefully.

What? Just because they all know the truth about werewolves, suddenly that means they’re ready to pool information? Because no. It’s bad enough the Argents have Derek in their sights. Stiles isn’t going to validate their suspicions about Scott as well.

“That a Glock?” Chris asks suddenly, nodding at the grip protruding from Stiles’s waistband.

Stiles nods.

“Ally,” Chris says.

Clearly they can communicate without words, because Allison nods and turns back to the SUV. She opens up the back door and leans into the car, reappearing seconds later with a small box. She hands it over to Chris, who holds it out to Stiles.

“Wolfsbane bullets,” Chris tells him. “What you’ve got there will hardly slow it down.”

Stiles takes the box awkwardly. Is he supposed to say thanks?

Because Chris Argent _could_ be an ally. Maybe he really didn’t know what his psycho relatives were up to this whole time. He’d been living in Arizona for years, and he hasn’t been back in Beacon Hills for long. It’s conceivable that he really was in the dark about what Kate and Gerard were up to. It’s also conceivable that he always has followed the code that Deaton talked about. But, with stakes this high, Stiles would be a fucking idiot to take anything on face value, right?

“Derek,” Chris says, frowning a little.

Derek stares at him warily.

“I’m sorry,” Chris says. “For what my family did to yours. To you.”

Maybe Chris Argent is an honorable man after all. Or maybe he’s just a really good liar.

“Let’s go,” Stiles says, and motions the others back toward the Jeep. “See you around, Argent.”

He tries to make it sound like as much of a threat as he can.

It probably doesn’t even register to a guy like Chris Argent.

 

***

 

“Allison Argent is really pretty,” Scott says thoughtfully as they’re heading back to town. “Did you see her dimples?”

“Scotty, are you thinking with your dick again?” Stiles asks. “Because that never goes well. Remember that time at high school you totally embarrassed yourself over that girl who was completely out of your league, and her douchebag boyfriend beat you up?”

Scott gives him the side eye. “That was _you_.”

“My point remains,” Stiles insists.

“Are you sure you actually have a point?” Scott asks him.

“Yes! Don’t go falling for the pretty girl who wants to kill all werewolves!”

Because look how that worked out for Derek.

There’s no traffic at this hour. The wind whistles though the vents in the Jeep—the air conditioning died years ago—and Scott fiddles with the radio.

“You okay back there, Der?” Stiles asks.

“Yeah.”

“This alpha thing,” Scott says, twisting around to look at Derek. “Does it get stronger with the full moon, or is it going to be like this all the time?”

“It waxes and wanes with the moon.”

“Cool.” Scott sighs. “Because I really don’t want to live in Stiles’s basement for the rest of my life. But I think that maybe you guys should chain me up from now until it’s a bit better?”

“You sure?” Stiles asks him.

“Yeah. Dude, I wasn’t in control. I guess it really was like sleepwalking, kind of. I don’t want to risk it again.”

Stiles looks across at him, just in time to see his expression change from one of anxious contemplation into horror.

“Stiles!”

Stiles slams on the brakes even while he’s twisting back to see what’s coming. All he sees is a black shape, moving fast toward them.

And then it hits.

The Jeep shudders.

Holy shit.

The _alpha_.

“Stay in the car!” Derek says, scrambling out the back of the Jeep.

“Does he mean you or me or both of us?” Scott asks, voice pitched high with terror.

“I don’t know, bro!” Stiles fumbles with the ammo that Chris gave him, shoving a clip into the Glock. “Clear communication isn’t exactly Derek’s thing!”

He flinches back from the window as the alpha peers in, and okay, yes, the alpha is legitimately the most terrifying thing Stiles has ever seen in his life. He doesn’t look like Scott or Derek when they shift. He looks entirely more monstrous: covered in matted dark hair, his spine bent like he can’t walk upright, jaw extended into a fang-filled muzzle. Definitely monstrous.

Derek’s moving quickly on the other side of the Jeep. He gets to the hood and bangs on it to draw the alpha’s attention. Derek hasn’t shifted. Why the hell hasn’t he shifted? Surely he needs some claws or fangs or just general pointy bits to even have a hope in hell of fighting the alpha.

But shifting is _bad_.

Fucking Kate Argent and her fucking bullshit. It’s survival of the fucking fittest out here, and she’s _neutered_ him.

The alpha moves around to the front of the Jeep, red gaze fixed on Derek.

Derek doesn’t even look afraid. He watches the alpha cautiously, but no more cautiously than he watches John when he grunts like a caveman before his morning coffee, to be honest. No more cautiously than he watches Stiles when Stiles screams at the Xbox. It’s like Derek is still so numb that he can’t tell the difference between those things, and _this_.

Because Derek doesn’t _care_ if he dies tonight, not really.

Derek glances at Stiles through the windshield. His eyes are bright in the headlights of the Jeep. That green-blue-gray color that defies any better description that that. Stiles could spent a lifetime and still not learn enough words to do Derek's eyes justice.

“Derek,” he says.

“Go,” Derek tells him.

No. Fuck that. This is not how shit works. Stiles didn’t get mixed up in all this werewolf shit _and_ get tortured by Kate Argent just to lose Derek now. That is not going to happen.

Derek squares his shoulders.

The alpha throws its misshapen head back and roars.

And Stiles raises his Glock and shoots at the motherfucker through the windshield.

  

***

 

The windshield shatters and showers the world in glittering chunks of glass. The alpha drops out of Stiles’s sight, and Stiles stumbles out of the Jeep with his firearm still drawn. Stiles has seen horror movies. He knows a thing is never as dead as it appears.

The alpha has vanished when he rounds the front of the Jeep.            

There’s a man lying on the ground instead. Black blood is pumping out of the hole Stiles put in his chest.

Derek is staring down at him with a mixture of horror and wonder.

“Derek?” Peter Hale asks, blinking up at him. Inky black fluid bubbles out of his mouth. “Derek, I’ve had the strangest dream.”

 


	11. Chapter 11

Holy shit.

Stiles just shot Peter Hale. Derek’s only surviving relative, Peter Hale. Who is also the alpha. Who is also the _reason_ he’s Derek’s only surviving relative, because Laura, but still. Friends don’t shoot friends’ only surviving relatives.

“Call Deaton,” Derek says from the back of the Jeep while Stiles drives. “We need to take him to the clinic. Have him meet us there.”

How is it that Derek can actually take charge in a situation like this, when Stiles feels like he’s drowning in wave after wave of crazy?

He calls Deaton. Manages to splutter out that they’re having a werewolf emergency and they’re on their way to the clinic. Deaton seems as calm and unruffled as always, but that’s possibly only because he has no idea what’s going on. If he knew, Stiles likes to think he’d be shitting bricks like a normal person.

Stiles squints as he drives. The wind is pretty much punching him in the face, and he swallows at least one bug before they hit the outskirts of town. Concentrating on seeing where he’s going and not swallowing any more bugs actually lets him ignore whatever’s happening in the back of the Jeep, and that can only be a good thing.

He hears a lot of growling and whining, and, once, Scott just saying “shit shit shit” under his breath like a mantra. He also hears Peter’s voice, confused and plaintive, ask what’s happening. Well, that’s two of them who’d really like to know.

When they get to the clinic Deaton is already waiting. He holds the door open while Derek and Scott haul Peter out of the back of the Jeep.

“Peter?” Deaton asks, and then his eyes widen. “Oh dear god.”

How very prosaic. Stiles would have expected him to blaspheme to one of the more obscure woodland deities. Or at least the moon. The man’s supposedly an emissary, an expert on the supernatural. It’s all very disappointingly Judeo-Christian.

And Stiles’s brain is apparently doing that thing where it panics and runs off in a thousand different directions at once.

“Bring the bullets,” Derek says, as he and Scott manhandle Peter into the clinic.

Stiles follows the trail of black goop in after them, the box of wolfsbane bullets in his hand. The trail  extends all the way through the front of the clinic to the rooms at the back. Stiles tries not to step in it and make the mess worse. Derek and Scott haven’t been so careful. Derek’s borrowed boots—a pair of John’s old department-issued 5.11 Tacticals that actually fit. Stiles has a narrow foot, okay? Not delicate. _Narrow_ —and Scott’s bare feet have both left oily smears through the goo.

In the back room, Derek and Scott are holding Peter down on the metal examination table, and, wow, that’s a lot of nakedness happening. Full frontal stuff. Stiles didn’t really notice before because of all the movement and shouting and other distracting stuff, but yeah. Now he notices.

Except he also notices the gunshot wound on the right side of Peter’s chest. He must have hit a lung. The black goo is bubbling out like frothy suds.

And he notices Peter’s face.

He’s not scarred like he was the last time Stiles saw him at the hospital. How is that even possible? And how is it that Stiles keeps fixating on the tiny impossible details rather than the big ones. Like _werewolves_. Probably because his brain keep trying to break everything down into tiny pieces that, in theory, are easier to manage without escaping into a fugue state. Stiles isn’t sure how successful that coping strategy is, but he’s still functioning, right? So that’s a plus.

“Derek?” Peter asks, lips stained black. His claws are out. They scrape against the examination table. “What’s happening, Derek?”

Derek doesn’t answer, and for once Stiles doesn’t think it’s down to his taciturn nature. ( _Is_ that his nature though, really, or is it just something Kate beat into him?) He opens and closes his mouth a few times, like he _wants_ to say something, but where the hell to start?

“You’ve been shot with wolfsbane, Peter,” Deaton says smoothly. “Try to stay calm.”

Which is easier said than done. Even Stiles wants to scream and writhe in sympathy when Deaton digs around in Peter’s chest and withdraws the bullet Stiles so kindly left there. Peter’s muscles cord and bulge, and he breaks out in sweat. His veins run black underneath his skin. His scream is more a howl than anything else. His eyes flash red.

“Bullets,” Deaton says, and holds his hand out toward Stiles. “Now, Deputy, if you please.”

Stiles passes them over, and Deaton moves to the counter at the side of the room.

It’s like no medical procedure Stiles has ever seen. Deaton cracks a bullet open, tips the powder into a metal dish, and sets fire to it. Then, just when Stiles is wondering what the hell that will accomplish, he steps back over to Peter and pours the still-smoking ashes into the wound.

Peter _roars_ , and Derek and Scott strain to hold him down on the table.

Oh Jesus Christ.

Stiles backs up, because there are fangs now, and Peter’s jaw is elongating, and if there’s a helpless shivering bunny in this scenario it’s Stiles, right? It’s always Stiles.

“Peter,” Derek says. “Look at me, Peter.”

Peter twists his head. He wrenches his arm free of Derek’s grasp, and clenches his fingers around his nephew’s forearm. His claws dig in, and blood wells out, but Derek doesn’t even flinch.

“Derek, I dreamed…” He shakes his head as though to clear it, and turns his head again to stare at Scott. “Who are you?”

“Um,” Scott says.

“Scott is pack,” Deaton says smoothly. He wipes a cloth over Peter’s chest, and Stiles is astonished to see that the wound is healed. As he watches, the puckered pink skin that was an entry wound only moments ago smooths out completely.

“Where’s Talia?” Peter asks, something suddenly fragile in his voice, and Stiles just can’t. “Where’s Laura?”

Stiles is done.

He pushes his way back outside again. “Cleaning up the Jeep,” he mutters, in case anyone’s even listening.

Jesus _fuck_.

He shot a coma patient.

Although, really, it’s the least convincing coma Stiles has ever seen. And Stiles watches a lot of telenovelas.

Okay, so on one hand Peter is the scary murderous alpha, but on the other hand—

Stiles pushes his way back out into the cold night air. He braces his hands against the hood of the Jeep, and stares at the fractured pieces of glass still doggedly hanging in the frame of the windshield.

On the other hand, Peter is as much a victim of the Argents as Derek is.

There are way too many victims in this town.

 

***

 

Stiles isn’t sure how long he sits there in the little parking lot, his back up against the Jeep’s front tire. It’s cold. He’s sitting with his legs drawn up, hugging his knees, when headlights dazzle him. Stiles raises one hand to shield his eyes, and rests his other one on the grip of the Glock still protruding from his jeans. Because what are the chances this night is done fucking with him?

Then familiar red and blue lights flash, and Stiles relaxes. He climbs to his feet just as his dad gets out of his cruiser.

“What the hell are you doing out at this hour?” John demands like Stiles isn’t actually a grown adult who pays taxes and everything. “And what the hell happened to your windshield?”

“It’s a really long story, Dad,” Stiles tells him.

At that moment a howl sounds from the clinic, so loud that it rattles the front windows.

“Holy shit,” John says. “What the hell was that?”

 

***

 

“Ten years?” Peter growls in a low voice when Stiles and John slip inside the clinic. “You’re telling me it’s been _ten fucking years_?”

Okay, now he’s skewing a little to the crazy side of the scale again.

He’s pacing back and forth in front of the examination table. Still naked. Like all the way naked. It’s kind of jarring. Like obviously this is a big emotional moment, all full of anger and pain and loss and devastating grief, but also, whoa, that’s a dick. And Stiles is incapable of not noticing it.

“Your mother would never have let that happen, Derek!” Peter’s eyes flash, but this time it’s with tears. “What aren’t you telling me?”

Deaton and Scott are keeping their distance. Derek’s the only one standing within reach of the alpha.

“It was my fault,” Derek says. “I was the one who told Kate about the tunnels.”

Peter has his clawed fingers wrapped around Derek’s throat in seconds, and is slamming him up against the wall.

“It wasn’t his fault!” Stiles yells, reaching for his Glock because yes, he will shoot this guy again if he has to.

Peter turns his head and growls, baring his fangs.

“Hold on now,” John says, stepping forward with his hands raised in a conciliatory gesture. “Let’s everybody take a breath, okay? It seems like there’s a lot of explaining and catching up to do, and tearing people’s throats out isn’t the best way to go about that, is it now?”

Sometimes Stiles imagines he’s the only one who hears his dad’s sarcasm. Like, he totally has this friendly, folksy sheriff thing going that people really respond to, but underneath he’s a sarcastic shit like Stiles. But if Stiles tried a line like that? He’d be as transparent as glass.

Peter tilts his head as though listening, and then shoves Derek away from him. He turns to face the sheriff. “You.”

John raises his eyebrows. “Me?”

Peter narrows his eyes. His brow scrunches up in confusion. “I know your voice. It kept me from…” He shakes his head. “Kept me _close_.”

“I used to come and read you the sports’ results,” John agrees. “When I got sick of dealing with all that political bullshit down at the station, or sick of listening to this one try and sell me a bridge.” He jerks his head at Stiles, who manfully resists the urge to squawk indignantly.

Peter turns his gaze on Deaton. “I dreamed terrible things. Where’s Laura?”

“Laura’s dead,” Deaton says, his voice soft. “You know that. You killed her, Peter.”

“She was not my alpha.” Peter raises a shaking hand in front of his face, and contemplates his clawed fingers. “She smelled wrong. She wasn’t Talia. I was looking for Talia.” He lowers his hand again, and looks puzzled. “It made me angry.”

Stiles feels a chill.

Peter frowns slightly. “Am I awake now?”

“You’re awake,” Derek says softly.

Peter stares at his claws again. “No. No, that can’t be right. This can't be _awake_."

In the silence, Derek reaches out and touches his shoulder. Peter doesn’t react.

 

***

 

“That man killed his niece,” John says, pacing the parking lot. He’s smoking a cigarette. The only time Stiles has seen him with a cigarette in his mouth is in old photographs from his army days, where he also appeared to have made questionable life choices about fashion and friends.

“How the hell do you smoke cigarettes?” Stiles demands. “You can’t even eat a bacon burger without me finding out!”

“I keep them in the cruiser,” John tells him. “For _emergencies_.”

 _Kept_ them, Stiles thinks mutinously. He _kept_ them in the cruiser. It’s definitely going to be the past tense when Stiles is done with him.

“Yeah, he did kill his niece,” Stiles says at last. “But…”

“But what?” John asks, raising his eyebrows. “You think we should let it go because he wasn’t in his right mind? You’re not a mental health professional, kid.”

“No,” Stiles says. “But I’ve seen a lot of crazy lately. You think you can put a werewolf on trial who doesn’t want to be there? Dad, the normal rules do not apply in this case. At all.”

“Stiles, it’s my job to protect the people of this town.” John gestures wildly, the cigarette in his hand trailing a twirling ribbon of smoke. Stiles is going to grab that cigarette and stomp on it in a second. “How am I supposed to do that if I let Peter walk out? How do I know he’s not going to snap?”

“How do you know Old Bob McBobberson isn’t going to snap after you let him off a speeding ticket?” Stiles asks.

“A speeding ticket is not a predictor of violence,” his dad tells him. “You can’t conflate a misdemeanour with a murder. And Bob McBobberson? That’s a _stupid_ name.”

Stiles shrugs.

“What the hell are we supposed to do with him, huh?” John asks, and drags his fingers through his hair.

Stiles looks at his dad expectantly.

"No!" John exclaims. “I am not running a goddamn foster home for traumatized werewolves!”

But even as he says it, Stiles can see his dad’s expression shift. He can no more abandon Peter Hale—the guy he dragged out of the fire, the guy he visited in the hospital, the guy who remembers his voice—than Stiles can abandon Derek. It just wouldn’t be right. And John taught Stiles better than that.

 

***

 

“Spent this whole time being scared of him, and now he’s sleeping in the basement,” Stiles whispers later that night. “I feel like I’m totally out of my depth here though. Like I’m over-reaching. I mean, the _alpha_? My dad’s right. How safe can he be?”

Peter had looked curiously at Scott when Scott had put the manacle around his ankle. He didn’t seem particularly bothered by it, but Stiles felt sick. It’s all about intent, right? And the intent here isn't to hurt Peter, it's to keep a werewolf from hurting others.

Except Kate Argent probably told herself the same thing about Derek.

Derek curls his fingers around Stiles’s.

“But also, I mean, how do you feel about him?” Stiles rolls onto his side, facing toward Derek, and studies his face in the moonlight. “Is he going to kill you for what you said about it being your fault, or is he going to try and hurt you?”

“It was my fault.”

Stiles sighs. “Okay, so this one time, when I was thirteen, I made friends with this cool guy online. He really got me, you know?”

Derek’s growl rumbles in his chest.

“Oh, so you can see where this is going,” Stiles says. “Point is, I didn’t give him any dick pics when he threatened to tell the entire world that I thought I was maybe attracted to boys as well as girls, because Scott found me heaving a panic attack about the whole thing, and the truth came out. I wasn’t stupid, Der. I was naïve, and I was lonely. I wanted to talk to someone about the stuff I was too scared to even tell my best friend, and he took advantage of that. So that was my fault, right?”

“You know it wasn’t!”

“Yeah, I do know,” Stiles tells him. “Because I was a kid and he manipulated me. How old were you?”

“Sixteen.”

Stiles traces his fingertip over Derek’s palm. “You were a kid too.”

From downstairs, Stiles can hear the TV. Scott’s sleeping on the couch. Well, not sleeping as the case may be. His earlier willingness to get chained up in the basement faded rapidly when he found out he’d be sharing the space with Peter. Stiles doesn’t blame him, not really. Peter seems to pitch sharply between terrifying and confused. But Scott didn’t want to get too far away, because he figured the non-murderous werewolves should outnumber the murderous ones. That’s what he said anyway. Stiles wonders if there’s more to it, like the bond between biter and bitten. That bond that had compelled Scott to go running off into the Preserve tonight. 

“You were just a kid too,” Stiles repeats.

Maybe if he says it often enough, it will start to sink in.

At least Derek doesn’t contradict him.

“I’m really sick of being in over my head here,” Stiles says. “With you, and Peter, and Matt and the Argents. You know what causes stress, Derek? It’s not however many obstacles there are in your path, or whatever mountains you have to climb, it’s the feeling that you’re not in control of any of it.”

Derek nods.

“So,” Stiles says, twining his fingers with Derek’s and squeezing his hand tight. “I think it’s about time we took back some fucking control.”


	12. Chapter 12

In the morning, Peter seems a little… well, _better_ probably isn’t the right word. Less murdery, maybe. Definitely quieter. When Derek releases him from the basement for breakfast, Peter sits silently at the kitchen table and watches as Stiles and John make pancakes and bacon. He still seems a little puzzled, and sometimes when Stiles catches his gaze he gets the impression that Peter’s got a million different questions on the tip of his tongue but he’s just not sure how to ask them. Or maybe he just doesn’t want to hear the answers. Stiles sees him staring at his own hands more than once, as though he can’t quite understand how they did the things they did.

Derek is as quiet as always too.

Stiles wonders if there’s such a thing as a werewolf-aware therapist, because shit, these guys.

The few things Derek has let slip about his family have been enough that Stiles knows they weren’t always like this. They couldn’t have been. These are just the living, breathing shells left over when grief and shock and unfathomable loss have carved out all the biggest parts of them.

It’s not fair to compare their loss to his. The circumstances are too different. Okay, so Derek and Peter lost eight people, and Stiles only lost one, but grief isn’t purely numerical. You can’t line losses up side by side and judge which one is bigger. Grief also isn’t static. Some days it’s just a whisper at the back of his mind, a bittersweet reminder that he loves his mom and he misses her and he’s sorry that she’s not here to share the day with him, but other times it’s a whirling dark maelstrom, pulling him in and drowning him all over again. The maelstrom days are fewer and farther between now, but they can still catch him like he only lost her yesterday.

Stiles sets plates down in front of Derek and Peter just as Scott, bleary-eyed, wanders into the kitchen.

“Hey, bro, you sleep okay on the couch?” Stiles feels a flash of guilt, because he could have given Scott his bed, right? Except the whole sleeping with Derek thing is just something that happens in the middle of the night when he’s already tried to get a few hours in his own bed. Stiles won’t admit to pre-planning it because then it would be weird. Because Derek might be his friend, but he doesn’t really know him that well. Whatever is happening between them—could be something, could be nothing, it’s all unchartered territory really—Stiles doesn’t want to have to look it in the face. That would mean putting a label on it, and Stiles has got nothing.

Scott yawns and stretches. “Yeah.”

Stiles sits down beside Derek with his own breakfast. The kitchen table is only small. John snags the last seat, leaving Scott to eat leaning against the counter.

“So, the Argents,” Stiles says.

John raises his eyebrows at him.

“They want us to think they’ve left town,” Stiles continues. “But I think that’s bullshit.”

“I do too,” John says, taking a sip of his coffee. “And watch your language.”

Stiles rolls his eyes. “Okay, so I was thinking last night, and we need to end this. We need to get them behind bars where they belong.” Or dead in a ditch. Stiles would also be okay with that. “Because none of you guys are safe with them out there. Not even you, Scotty.”

Scott nods worriedly.

“Peter,” Stiles says, and Peter looks at him sharply. “There’s probably no way to ask this nicely, but can you like sniff them out somehow? Like are werewolves anything like bloodhounds? Jesus, that’s probably a really offensive comparison, isn’t it?”

“I find I am beyond offence,” Peter says with a slight, sad smile.

Right. Peter’s still coming to terms with the fact he killed Laura. A potentially offensive dog comparison has nothing on that.

Peter studies his pancakes for a moment. “I may not be the best person for the job. I can’t know what will happen if I find them. I may not be able to control my anger.”

“Okay, I understand that,” Stiles tells him. “But also, Scott’s been a werewolf for about a week now, and he hasn’t really got a handle on what he can do yet. And Derek…”

“Derek what?” Peter asks, an edge of sharpness in his tone.

Derek won’t meet his gaze.

“Derek won’t shift,” Stiles says. “Or do any wolfy stuff.”

Peter narrows his eyes slightly. “Why not?”

“Peter.” John reaches out and claps a hand gently on Peter’s shoulder. “That’s something you and Derek should talk about in private, I think.”

Derek shakes his head quickly.

“Okay,” John says. “Or I can fill you in a little, if that’s alright with Derek.”

A reluctant nod from Derek.

“We’ll talk later,” John says. “In the meantime, Derek doesn’t shift. Which means Stiles is right, and if picking up their trail is something werewolves are capable of doing, you’re our best option.”

“I can try,” Peter says. “I’m an alpha now, apparently.” The shadow of something like horror crosses his expression before he schools his features again. “Alpha powers are stronger than beta. Talia…” His voice cracks, and he swallows. “Talia could track any of the kids in the dark in the middle of a rain storm. You remember that, Derek? When Cora ran away because she didn’t want to do her homework project, and Talia headed straight for her?”

Derek stands abruptly, pushing his breakfast away, and hurries out of the room.

Stiles follows him.

“I didn’t…” Peter sounds a little bewildered. “I didn’t mean to upset him.”

Whatever John says in return is pitched too low for Stiles to catch.

He follows Derek up the stairs, and finds him in his room.

He’s kneeling.

Shit. This again.

“Der.” Stiles sits down on the floor beside him.

“How can he even _look_ at me?” Derek whispers.

Stiles rests his palm on the back of Derek’s neck. His skin is always so warm to the touch. “You’re pack. I don’t know exactly what that means, but if it’s anything like what family means to me, that’s how. Me and my dad, we’ve made mistakes. We’ve hurt each other. But family is the most important thing.”

Derek shifts so that he’s sitting too. He doesn’t shake Stiles’s hand off. They sit quietly for a long time. Stiles listens to the sound of the neighbors’ sprinkler chuff-chuff-chuffing as the head turns. At the end of every rotation the spray hits the side of the Stilinskis’ garage. He can hear a dog barking further up the street, and someone a few houses down is listening to the radio. The faint strains of music slip through Derek’s window, carried on the breeze. A lazy, uneventful morning in a sleepy little street.

“When I was thirteen, I came out to him,” Stiles says. “Kind of had to, because of what I told you about last night, remember?”

Derek nods.

“I wasn’t ready to come out, I don’t think, and the circumstances weren’t exactly ideal. He got home to find me curled up in a ball crying on the couch, and Scott just kept saying, ‘Tell him what’s wrong. You have to tell him.’ God only knows what he thought I’d done.” He smiles slightly, but it’s tinged with pain. “Anyway, I thought that he’d be, I don’t know, angry. Disappointed. A lot of that was my own insecurities, and it was mostly exacerbated by what my so-called friend on the internet had been telling me for months. Feeding me horror stories of kids who got assaulted and thrown out of home, and making out like he was the only one I could trust and blah blah blah.”

“That doesn’t sound like your dad though.”

“Of course it doesn’t,” Stiles says. “But what if it was? It’s risk versus reward. Say nothing, try to live a lie, and nothing will change. Say something, and there’s a chance it will change for the worse. But of course I had to tell him what happened, because it’d been forced on me. And he _was_ angry.”

Derek raises his eyebrows.

“Not at me,” Stiles says. “At the asshole online. But I was just coming down from one panic attack and ready to dive straight into another one, and all I could register was that he was so angry.” He shivers a little at the memory. “It was an epic mess, but eventually we established that he loved me and that it was unconditional. Really unconditional I mean, not like those parents who say their love in unconditional right up until their kids bring home a boyfriend instead of a girlfriend or the other way around. And I think, Der, I _hope_ , that it works that way in your pack too.”

“I don’t know if it can.”

Stiles isn’t sure if he’s talking about his mistake of trusting Kate Argent, or the fact that Peter killed Laura.

“These aren’t small things,” Stiles says. “I get that. And the pain is still very fresh, for both of you.” He looks up to see Peter standing awkwardly in the doorway.

Derek lifts his gaze to meet Peter’s.

Peter steps inside the room and, to Stiles’s surprise, sits down on the other side of Derek. His fingers touch Stiles’s as he reaches up to cup the back of Derek's neck, and Stiles shifts his hand away. He’s not exactly sure what he’s watching here. It seems more animal than human. For a moment it looks like Derek is going to pull away, but Peter makes a rumbling sound in his throat, and Derek tilts his chin up instead. The gesture appears almost reluctant. Peter leans in toward him and sniffs. Then he presses his face against Derek’s throat and holds it there for a moment. The second he straightens up again, Derek seems to crumble. He turns into Peter’s embrace, and rests his head on Peter’s shoulder. He’s shaking with what Stiles is sure are tears. Peter keeps one hand on his back, and cards the fingers of his other hand through his hair.

Tears slide down Peter’s face as he stares at the wall, and makes tiny shushing sounds as he strokes Derek’s hair.

It’s a long road ahead, Stiles thinks, and the journey is going to be wrapped up in guilt and pain and blame on both sides. There are no easy answers, and no easy fixes either. But it’s a start, and that’s what matters.

He sneaks away and leaves them in privacy.

 

***

 

“Parrish called,” John says when Stiles makes his way downstairs again.

“Yeah?”

John and Scott are sitting at the kitchen table, finishing their breakfast. It looks like John is finishing everyone else’s breakfast too. Peter and Derek’s plates are suspiciously bacon free, and Stiles is fairly certain they weren’t when he left the room. He gives Scott a questioning look and gets a nod of confirmation in return.

“The hospital reported Peter missing.”

“Took them long enough.”

“The man’s been in a coma for a decade, Stiles,” John says. “They probably haven’t checked on him every few hours for years.” John sips his coffee. “Anyway, because of course it’s Peter _Hale_ , Jordan wanted to let me know straight away. So how do you want to play this?”

“I’m guessing they think he was abducted,” Stiles says. “Because of the whole coma patient thing.”

“That seems to be the current theory, yes.”

The wheels turn fast in Stiles’s brain. “Okay, so we let Peter track Kate and Gerard, and then what if we say that they—”

“We are not framing anyone for abduction,” John says. “Not even the Argents.”

“Two birds, one stone,” Stiles suggests.

“How the hell did you even pass your ethics modules at the academy?” John asks.

“I cheated,” Stiles tells him with a grin. “Ironic, right?”

Of course his dad knows it’s a lie. Stiles is too smart to resort to cheating. And he happens to have a perfect grasp of ethics, in theory. He also happens to have a worryingly perfect grasp of how it doesn’t always translate into an imperfect world. Most cops take a few years on the job to really develop that sense of cynicism. Stiles was a cynical toddler.

“We don’t need to frame them for anything,” John says firmly. “What they’ve actually done is more than enough to see the pair of them die behind bars.”

“Kate’s the main one though,” Scott points out. “Like, how involved is Gerard? I’ll bet with a decent lawyer he could pretend he had nothing to do with Derek and the fire. Hell, we don’t even know for sure if he did, right?”

“Doesn’t matter,” John says. “He knew Kate was holding Derek, and he sure as hell knew she took Stiles and hurt him. That makes him an accomplice. Even a fifteen year sentence is life to an old man. Anyway, I’m more interested in how to make a case without ever once using the word _werewolf_. I like my job. I’d like not to lose it because I’m a crazy person.”

“Vote for John Stilinski,” Stiles intones. “Keeping Beacon Hills safe for humans _and_ werewolves.”

John looks like the man who’s just seen his entire election campaign flash in front of his eyes. He groans. “Let’s concentrate on catching the Argents first. We can worry about werewolves later.”

“Words to live by, Dad,” Stiles says. “Words to live by.”

 

***

 

Going back to Gerard Argent’s house is not high on Stiles’s bucket list, but it’s the one place they know that Peter has any hope of picking up both Gerard and Kate’s scents, and it’s wolfsbane free. Stiles tells himself he can totally handle it, but when he approaches the front door, he freezes.

“Kiddo?” his dad asks quietly, while Scott heads around the back of the house to make sure it’s clear.

Stiles suddenly can’t breathe. It’s not even like a panic attack. It’s a flashback. It's like he’s in that basement again, his arms wrenched behind him, and he just can’t breathe.

Derek presses a hand on his chest and another on his back, just like he did in the basement when he was keeping Stiles’s core straight.

Stiles sucks in a shaking breath. “Thanks, Der.”

Derek leans in and sniffs at his throat. The gesture is still weird, but it’s also comforting. Stiles thinks he knows what it means now. It means pack. It also means that Derek is letting his wolf take what it needs, and that has to be a good sign. Sure, werewolves are objectively terrifying, and Stiles should be scared. He knows what they’re capable of, thanks to Peter. But just because Peter’s wolf lashed out in fear and anger doesn’t mean it’s a monster. Hurt animals are sometimes the most dangerous of all.

John has the keys to the house. He unlocks the door, and ducks under the police tape to get inside. Peter follows him in.

“I’m gonna wait out here,” Stiles says.

He sits on the front step, and Derek sits beside him.

“Not really eager to get in there,” Stiles says.

“Thank you.”

Stiles looks at him curiously. “For what?”

“For saving me,” Derek says. He reaches out and takes Stiles’s hand. “I didn’t even know I needed it, until you came.”

“You saved me too,” Stiles says, bumping his shoulder against Derek’s. “That day, in her house, she was legit going to shoot me. And you stood in front of me. Saved me. Why’d you do that?”

Derek flushes, color rising on his cheeks. “I don’t know.”

“Really?”

“My wolf,” Derek says, swallowing and staring at his feet. “My wolf made me do it.”

Stiles smiles.

Yeah. In what world is Stiles supposed to be terrified of werewolves again? Because as far as he can tell, they’re not the bad guys.

“I know you might not want to hear this,” Stiles says. “I know you’re probably not ready to hear this. But your wolf? There is nothing you’ve ever told me about it that makes me think it’s bad, that _you’re_ bad. Your wolf is just another side of you, right? And I don’t believe you’ve got a bad side, Der, whatever Kate made you think. I don’t.”

Derek squeezes his hand.

Stiles turns his head to look at him, and his breath catches in his throat.

Derek’s beautiful. Stiles has known that since the first time he saw him, of course, but it’s more than his looks. He’s strong, too, stronger than he thinks. And he’s _good_. And there are a million different reasons that make this moment between them—suddenly laden with anticipation—a really, really bad idea, but, as Stiles leans in toward him, he actually can’t articulate a single one.

Derek’s stubble is rough, but his lips are soft. Kissing him is like slipping into warm water. It’s soothing, and sweet, and it feels like home. The kiss is gentle, and it’s chaste, and it’s Stiles’s whole universe in this moment in time. He loves Derek. The realization isn’t shocking. How could it be? He loves him, and this feels perfect.

It is perfect, right up until the moment Scott rounds the corner of the house again.

“Whoa!”

Stiles and Derek pull away from each other. Derek is blushing furiously. So is Stiles, probably.

“Um,” Scott says, then grimaces because he clearly has nothing to say. He inspects the front path instead, avidly.

Stiles smiles at Derek, and Derek squeezes his hand again.

Yeah, they’re okay.

A few minutes later John and Peter emerge from the house.

“I have their scent,” Peter says. “I can track it.”

Right.

Game on.


	13. Chapter 13

John drives at a crawl through the back roads outside of Beacon Hills. The windows in the cruiser are cracked open, but Stiles has no idea exactly what Peter’s doing. He’s curious as hell, but meanwhile he’s got to concentrate on his driving, and on not back ending the cruiser with his Jeep. His dad would not appreciate that.

“Can you smell anything?” he asks Derek.

“Pine,” Derek says, lifting his nose. “Diesel fumes. Curly fries. You.”

“Wait, what? The last time I ate curly fries in this car was like two weeks ago. That’s awesome!”

In the back, Scott sniffs experimentally. “Dude, when did you last change your socks?”

Stiles sniffs too. What?

Beside him, Derek actually smiles.

“What? These are clean!” Except are they, or did Stiles just pick them up off the floor this morning?

“My mom used to tell us it was rude to point things like that out,” Derek says. “The things that regular people couldn’t smell.”

Stiles sniffs again. “I’m pretty sure these were clean!”

“They’re not bad,” Derek tells him, quirking up the side of his mouth and shrugging. “But they’re not clean.”

Great.

“What other things can you smell?” Stiles asks. “Like, if you can smell my socks, can—” And then he stops, because there is no way this conversation is going to end in a comfortable place. “Oh my god.”

“My brother Matty once asked his teacher when her baby was coming,” Derek says. “She didn’t even know she was pregnant. Mom had to pretend it was a weird phase he was going through where he asked every woman he met the same question.”

Stiles huffs out a laugh.

It’s good to hear Derek talk about his family without immediately circling back around to blaming himself. Good to hear him talk about werewolf abilities—even gross ones—without immediately shutting down because it’s _bad_. Kate Argent has a hell of a lot to answer for and, with any luck, she’s about to.

The cruiser takes a right turn onto Southwood Road, and Stiles follows.

It’s not an area Stiles is very familiar with. Mostly because nothing ever happens out here. He thinks once a bunch of kids were having a loud party in someone’s barn, but other than that he doesn’t think he’s ever been on a call out here. It’s semi-rural. The sort of place where you’re just as likely to find a cow in the front yard as a dog.

“The Argents got any property out here?” he asks Scott.

Scott leans forward between the front seats and peers at the road. “Nothing that came up in searches of them or their associates.”

People like the Argents, Stiles guesses, can cover their tracks pretty well though.

The cruiser, still moving at a crawl, pulls over to the side of the road. Stiles pulls in after it.

His dad and Peter climb out, Peter sniffing the air avidly.

“Peter says we’re close,” John says, coming up to Stiles’s window. “Thing is, do we call in backup on information we have no way of explaining how we came by, or do we do a recon first?”

“Recon,” Stiles says. “If we get something solid we can call it in as an anonymous tip.”

“Let’s go then,” John says. “See what we find.”

 

***

 

John opens the trunk of his cruiser before they go, and hands out Kevlar vests. Peter regards his curiously.

“Werewolves can heal very rapidly,” he says at last.

“I don’t care how fast you can heal,” John tells him, strapping the vest on him. “It’s better to avoid getting shot in the first place.”

Peter looks oddly surprised.

Stiles makes sure Derek has his vest fitted properly. Then he checks his own vest, checks his Glock, checks Scott is kitted up too, and then they continue down the road on foot.

 

***

 

About half a mile down the road, Peter turns down a narrow track that leads between a sagging chain fence and a line of trees. Twenty minutes later they cross a narrow road, and then Stiles sees the place. It’s a barn. Not a cute folksy wooden barn like those they passed on their way up here. This is a steel-framed barn. Industrial looking. The signage on the side says _Beacon Organic Eggs_.

Wait, this is where the locally sourced organic eggs that Stiles buys come from? He’d thought he was being _ethical_. The packaging promises hay-filled nesting boxes and fat, contented chickens that get to wander around in the sunlight, not this steel monstrosity. This is false advertising. Also, Stiles should read the fine print.

The breeze changes, and at that moment Stiles is hit in the face by a truly disgusting smell. Chicken shit. Lots and lots of chicken shit.

He is seriously never eating eggs again in his life.

But kudos to the Argents for picking such a stinky place to hide out. They probably figured even an alpha couldn’t track them here.

“Are you sure?” John asks Peter in a low voice.

Peter nods, eyes flashing red. He curls his lip and shows his fangs.

“What now?” Stiles asks. “Call it in?”

At that moment Peter roars, his face contorting into the alpha’s, and starts running for the barn.

“Holy shit!” John exclaims. “Peter!”

Peter roars again, and is it a command? Because Stiles can see the way that Derek and Scott both react immediately to the sound, like it’s pulling them toward Peter. Scott’s shifted as well, and Derek looks to be fighting it. Then Peter roars a third time, and their scant control chatters. They both break cover and head for Peter.

“Fuck it,” John says, shaking his head grimly. “Let’s do it.”

Stiles gapes. His dad is a badass.

They run for the barn together.

 

***

 

Stiles would like it stated for the record that he does not want to die in a barn full of caged chickens. It stinks, and the air is full of dust and feathers, and if he gets pecked into a million tiny pieces he’s going to be _pissed_. He follows Peter and the wolves through the door, Glock out, and registers the sound of gunfire before his eyes have even had a chance to adjust to the dim light.

He flings himself sideways, and hunkers down behind a row of cages. Manic chickens, probably driven mad by their sunlamps, squawk and beat their wings at him.

This is _not_ good.

John crouches down beside him.

“Two shooters,” he says. “Front centre, and one on the left.”

Stiles resists the urge to ask him what to _do_ , because this is no training exercise like at the academy. Mostly because in those they had hand signals, and a plan, and a blessedly chicken-free environment. But also everyone on the team knew their position, and didn’t just randomly charge headfirst into danger like the wolves are currently doing. At least Peter and Scott have fangs and claws. Last Stiles saw Derek he was still entirely human-looking.

Jesus.

Stiles is not Action Movie Hero Guy. He is never going to be Action Movie Hero Guy. He’s Action Movie Snarky Sidekick Guy. He’ll probably get shot just so everyone else can be really sad, but also properly motivated to get Kate Argent.

And better him than his dad. Just being in this situation with his dad makes all those oldest fears flood back. When Stiles was a kid he read an article about how the British royal family didn’t travel together, so if something bad happened they wouldn’t all get taken out at once. That’s some good solid thinking right there. Protect your interests by diversifying, right? Actually, that might be stock market advice. Whatever. Point is, Stiles and his dad shouldn’t be in this together where the chances of a Stilinski taking a bullet are twice as high as they would have been if his dad were safely home snoozing in the couch.

There’s a sudden burst of howls and roars from the centre of the rows of cages, and Stiles resists the very stupid urge to stick his head out and see what’s going on.

“You wanna go for the guy on the left, kid?” John asks him. “I’ll cover you.”

Stiles nods, and swallows. “Team Stilinksi for the win, right?”

“I’ve got your back, kiddo.”

It’s his front Stiles is worried about.

His dad squeezes his shoulder tightly for a moment, then stands and starts firing into the left corner of the barn. It’s enough to get the shooter to back the hell down. It buys Stiles a few seconds to move.

He stays ducked down as much as he can, managing to get two more rows over before his dad is forced to take cover again. Stiles isn’t even sure if his dad can see him or not, but gives the thumbs up in his general direction.

_Not dead yet, Dad._

He waits until his dad provides covering fire for him, and moves again. The frantic chickens are probably damn good cover as well, for anyone trying to get a fix on his position. It’s a frenzy of blurred motion down amongst the cages.

Stiles rounds the final corner at last, and finds himself staring side-on at Matt. Fucking _Matt_. Asshole traitor fucking Matt who is still firing over toward where John has taken cover.

Stiles’s finger actually twitches on the trigger. Who would really know, in all this chaos, what had happened? It turns out that he’s more ethical than he thought.

“Matt. Drop your weapon.”

Matt spins to face him, his smug face slack with surprise. “Stiles. Good to see you again, buddy.”

“Drop your weapon,” Stiles repeats.

Matt drops his handgun. He’s still smirking though, the fucker. Why is he still smirking?

Kick it over to me,” Stiles says. “Then get down on—”

The press of a barrel against his temple is the first and only warning Stiles gets that he’s royally fucked this up.

“Aw, cutie pie,” Kate purrs in his ear. “Am I happy to see you!”

Stiles’s blood runs cold.

“Maybe you should drop your weapon too,” Kate says.

It’s not a suggestion. Also, Stiles remembers how this went last time, and fuck that. If he’s going to die here, he’s not going to do it unarmed and defenseless.

He swallows, nods.

Then brings his elbow up so fast the bitch doesn’t see it coming. He hears it crack against her jaw, and the impact throws her aim off. But the time she jerks her finger against the trigger, she’s already halfway to hitting the ceiling anyway, and Stiles is doing the opposite and hitting the floor.

He lands awkwardly, rolls onto his back, and fires up at the bitch.

Not Action Movie Hero Guy, Stiles.

He wings her, he thinks, but she doesn’t go down. Instead she vanishes into the rows of cages, and Stiles would love to dive after her, except Matt.

He twists his head to see where that asshole’s gone.

He’s vanished.

In the distance Stiles hears smashing glass, maybe. It’s hard to hear anything, really. He’s knows everything is loud and chaotic around him, but he’s hyper-focused on Kate and Matt and not really taking much else in. He can hear his heartbeat though, loud as a drum, and the roar of the blood rushing through his skull.

He’s still aiming his Glock in the direction Kate left when Derek rushes around the corner.

“Stiles!” Derek is covered in blood. “Are you okay?”

“Kate,” he gasps out. “Matt.”

“They’re gone,” Derek says, dropping to his knees besides Stiles. “Are you hurt?”

Gone? Well that’s the fucking problem isn’t it? Stiles fucked up again. He almost wishes he was shot, just a little bit, so at least he’d have an excuse.

“I’m fine,” he groans, and Derek helps him to his feet.

 

***

 

Peter screams as Scott shoves a handful of smoldering ashes into his wounds. At least he led from the front. Stiles will give him that.

 

***

 

It’s not a total loss. They have Gerard. He’s looking a little worse for wear as Scott hauls him out into the daylight again, and shoves him down onto his knees in the dirt. John cuffs him.

“You good?” John asks Stiles.

Derek is scanning the tree line for Matt and Kate.

“Couldn’t catch either of them,” Stiles mutters, feeling the sting of humiliation.

“Not your fault,” John says, and raises his voice. “Maybe if someone hadn’t gone running in half-cocked, we could have had enough backup to get the place surrounded.”

“Why should I wait?” Peter asks, eyes still red. “How can you expect me to _wait_? They killed my family!”

“ _Wait_ does not mean the same as _no_!” John exclaims. “You’ll get justice, Peter. Haven’t I always said that?”

Stiles figures it wasn’t just the sports results that his dad read Peter in the hospital.

“I am the _alpha_!” Peter growls, fangs lengthening.

It’d be enough to make most men step back.

John steps forward. “And I’m the goddamn _sheriff_!”

Stiles's jaw drops. His dad is totally badass today.

Peter growls again, and turns away.

John doesn’t leave it there. “Peter. Peter, you look at me when I’m talking to you.”

Badass or death wish? The line is getting blurred.

Peter turns back and glares at him.

John’s expression softens. “We’ll get them. We’re gonna get them, okay? I promise.”

“You promise?” For a second Peter sounds almost like a little kid.

“I promise,” John repeats. “Now let’s get Gerard down to the station.”

 

***

 

Scott and John take Gerard to the station. Stiles takes Derek and Peter back to the house to get cleaned up. He’s not really sure how his dad is going to explain everything. His dad probably isn’t sure either. But they’ll come up with something, right?

Peter takes the first shower, and Stiles collects his clothes to bundle them into the washer. Then he takes a second look at the shirt, and bundles it into the trash instead. It’s got at least two bullet holes in it. One in the sleeve and one in the neck. Derek’s jeans have a bloody hole in the thigh. Stiles bins them as well.

It’s getting late.

It’s dark already.

Only two more nights until full moon.

Stiles can hear Peter and Derek talking upstairs. He can’t hear what they’re saying, but they're talking. That’s a minor miracle for Derek.

Stiles takes the trash bag out and puts it in the garbage can. Then he heads back inside to the kitchen and inspects the fridge. He shudders when he sees the eggs. No, just no. He pulls his phone out and calls his dad.

“Hey, kid.”

“Hey, Dad. Are you and Scott gonna be a while?”

“Probably. Why?”

“Just wanted to know how many pizzas I should order for dinner.”

“Don’t you dare eat pizza without me!” John instructs him. “We’ll be about another hour or so, I guess? You want us to pick some up on the way back?”

“Yeah. Gerard settling in well?”

“Not a happy camper at all, that one. Wants us to wait until his lawyer gets here before questioning him.”

“So?”

“So his lawyer is in South Carolina.”

“What a fucking asshole!”

John laughs. He sounds tired. “Well it’s no skin off my nose if he gets to cool his heels in a holding cell overnight, right? Means I can make it home for pizza.”

That’s true,” Stiles agrees. “We could probably get meatlovers, what with all the carnivores.”

“I’m also a carnivore,” his dad points out.

“You are an omnivore,” Stiles tells him. “It’s all in the teeth, Dad. They’re a dead giveaway. You—”

“Hold on.” John’s voice is suddenly tense. “Parrish, what the hell is he doing here?”

Stiles doesn’t hear Parrish’s reply.

“Chris Argent,” John huffs into the phone. “Apparently he thinks he’s here to pay Gerard’s bail.”

“Seriously? He’s only been there like an hour!” Stiles feels a chill run through him. Not only has there been no bail hearing, and won’t be until at least tomorrow, but how the hell does Chris Argent know his father was arrested already? Who told him? “Dad? Dad?”

He hears some sort of commotion in the background of the call.

“Get the lights back on!” John yells. His voice already sounds distant. “Parrish, get to the generator!”

“Dad?” Stiles asks again, gripping his phone tightly.

And then he hears the explosion and the call drops out.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Due to my home internet dying today--and the company staying it might be 5 days until it's fixed (fuck you sideways, Telstra)--I'm not sure what will happen to my posting schedule. I can't really access AO3 from work, which is my only other option, because that would be difficult to explain to the boss. But my home internet, although patchy and intermittent, does seem to connect for at least a few minutes every hour as long as I make a small sacrifice to the pagan gods and hold my tongue just right. 
> 
> So hopefully there will be no huge disruption to my posting schedule, although it'll probably take longer to get to replying to all your comments!


	14. Chapter 14

The street outside the station is blocked by the fire department. Stiles slams the brakes on the Jeep, and lurches out, leaving the keys in the ignition. Derek and Peter follow. A firefighter tries to stop him from getting past the truck.

Stiles flashes his badge. “Where’s your captain? Where is she?”

He knows Captain O’Shea from interdepartmental training days, and also from her epic Sunday barbecues, which tend to last well into the early hours of Monday morning. He once woke up face down in an empty inflatable kiddy pool thanks to Madeline O’Shea and her ‘Try this!’ home brewing system. Not his finest hour. But nowhere near his most shameful either, which says more about Stiles's life choices that he would like to admit. 

O’Shea comes jogging over when she sees him.

“Don’t send your guys in!” Stiles tells her. “It’s an attack. It’s not an accident. It’s an attack.”

O’Shea barks orders into her radio, and waves her team back. “What do you need, Stiles?”

The nearest department is about fifty miles away in Blue Lake Valley. It’s not close enough, even coming lights and sirens.

“Call the Valley,” Stiles says. “Get their guys coming. And tell them to notify the FBI.” He watches the station, the smoke curling from the roof. The flicker of flames from the collapsed facade at the front of the building. “Any of our off duty guys show, tell them there’s an unknown number of armed offenders inside. Get a cordon up and keep everyone else out.”

“These guys?” O’Shea asks, nodding at Peter and Derek.

“These guys are with me,” Stiles tells her, and heads for the station.

The front door is a no-go zone. Stiles feels sick just looking at it. The doors and windows have been blasted out by the force of the explosion. It looks like the ceiling has collapsed. There are flames.

Is that where his dad was standing?

Please no.

Stiles breaks into a run and heads down the back of the station. He tries to figure out how many people were working when the bomb went off. It was after office hours, so at least the admin staff should have gone home. But with the current major investigations going on, it’s impossible to know how many deputies were still working.

From the back parking lot, the station looks relatively undamaged apart from the smoke wafting out over the roofline. And Stiles isn’t the only one trying to get in the back door. There’s someone with a crowbar trying to lever it open. She’s got a crossbow slung over his back.

“Allison?” he calls, raising his Glock and pointing it at her.

She twists around to look at him. “My dad’s in there!”

So is his.

“You dad fucking _did_ this!” Stiles shouts at her.

“He didn’t!” She wrenches at the door again uselessly. “He came down because Gerard’s lawyer called and said he needed to post bail!”

“There’s no bail!” Stiles says, his voice cracking. “There’s no fucking lawyer yet!”

Allison flings the crowbar away. It bounces on the asphalt. “My dad didn’t do this!”

Stiles flicks the safety off.

Derek puts his hand over Stiles’s forearm and presses his arm down firmly. “She’s not lying, Stiles.”

Stiles strides forward. “Get out of the fucking way!”

Allison moves aside.

Stiles swipes his security card in the reader. The light flashes red. He tries it again. Green this time, thank fuck. Stiles takes a deep breath and eases the door open.

The corridor is full of smoke. The sprinkler system is working. Stiles steps into the spray, a part of him actually surprised at how steady his hands are. That can’t be normal, right? He doesn’t question it though. Just keeps moving slowly into the station.

It’s like something out of a nightmare. Ever since he could walk he’s been running up and down these hallways. He knows ever corner. Every square of those awful carpet tiles. Every scuff mark on the walls. This isn’t just his workplace, or his dad’s. This is his childhood too.

Smoke swirls down the corridor.

Water slides down his face.

He can hear someone moaning. He rounds the corner to find Ramirez on the floor. There’s blood on his face, and he’s holding his hands over a stomach wound that’s pumping thick, dark blood through his fingers.

“Ramirez?” Stiles crouches down beside him.

“Lewin’s dead,” Ramirez groans. “Kate. Kate Argent. She shot— Stiles. Stiles, I think, I think the sheriff’s…”

No. No no no.

Not fucking happening.

“Shh,” Stiles says, and jerks his chin at Derek. “Derek. Get Ramirez out of here, okay? Get him to the paramedics.”

“I’m not leaving you,” Derek says.

“Please, Derek,” Stiles says. “Please.”

Derek wavers.

“Derek, he’s my friend!” And he deserves better than to bleed out on the goddamn floor. If he’s got any chance at all, he needs to get to help now. Stiles can’t just leave him here, and he needs Derek to be the one to take Ramirez out of here.

Derek steps forward.

“She was going for the holding cells,” Ramirez manages as Derek lifts him carefully.

Of course she was. She’s here to break Gerard out, and probably to kill as many people as she can in retaliation for Gerard’s arrest. Because she’s a fucking psycho.

“I’ll get her,” Stiles tells him. “I’ll get her.”

It’s a lie, probably.

“Wait for me,” Derek tells him, and carries Ramirez toward the exit.

Stiles doesn’t answer. He meets Peter’s gaze. He catches Allison’s gaze too, the smoke swirling between them. Allison is an Argent. He doesn’t trust her. He’s pretty damn sure she doesn’t trust him either.

He doesn’t want her here now.

He doesn’t want Derek here either, because Stiles promised Derek that he’d save him from Kate.

And Derek won’t shift. Won’t bring his fangs and his claws into a fight. But Peter will.

Peter will charge fucking headfirst into peril just to chase the promise of vengeance. He’s already done it once today. And that’s exactly the sort of reckless, dangerous killing machine Stiles wants on his side at the moment. Stiles wants the monster. Stiles wants the _alpha_.

“You’re not going to wait, are you?” Allison asks him.

“No,” Stiles admits.

Peter’s eyes flash red in understanding.

They head deeper into the station.

 

***

 

It’s a nightmare though. The smoke, the dark, the sprinklers. The flicker of flames as they work their way toward the front of the building. And blood. There’s blood too, or at least something smeared along the wall at hand height that’s as black as ink in the scant glow of the emergency lighting, and Stiles thinks was left there by Ramirez as he tried to stagger toward escape.

The bullpen is full of smoke too.

No debris. Just…

Stiles had a massive crush on Tara when he was a teenager. Because she’s gorgeous, and she’s funny, and she doesn’t put up with any bullshit. And now she’s lying on the floor behind her desk, and there’s a small black hole in the middle of her forehead, and a darkening stain on the carpet tiles underneath her.

“Tara?” he asks in a whisper, which is dumb, because he can see she’s dead. He can _see_ it, he just can understand it. Seeing is believing, except when it isn’t.

And he’s a terrible person, because he sees Tara lying like this, and it’s not her he’s thinking of. He’s already thinking of finding his dad like this, and trying to prepare himself for how much worse that moment is going to be.

“No,” he’d said weeks ago, months ago, whatever. “I mean, they put dirt on their faces, but their hair is always still so _clean_.”

“No way. It’s the teeth,” John had said. “The teeth are always the giveaway. Post-apocalyptic wasteland, but everyone’s got perfect teeth. And women always shave. World’s burning around them, but they’ve got smooth legs.”

Nobody can pick apart movies like Stiles and his dad. They don’t always like the same things, but they guaranteed hate the same things. Unrealistic post-apocalyptic scenarios are at the top of the list.

Worlds filled with fire and smoke and death don’t seem so funny now.

Stiles heads toward the front of the station, toward the heat, the flames.

Foster is dead too.

And Buchanan.

They’re burned, both of them. Burned black and red. Foster’s hair is gone. Stiles looks at his face and can’t see anything he recognizes. Nothing that even looks like a face, really. Just a strangely misshapen _thing_ that’s wearing Foster’s orange Stand Up to Cancer wristband.

Buchanan’s glasses are cracked.

Stiles steps over what might be part of the ceiling. He sees a pair of legs sticking out from behind the collapsed front counter of the station. Above the counter, the grill is still down, but it’s shattered inward. Flames lick the ceiling on the other side of grill.

“Dad!” Stiles steps forward, and is driven back by the heat.

The legs twitch.

Peter catches him by the elbow, staring intently at the figure behind the counter. “That’s not him.”

The light from the flame flickers in Peter’s gaze, and illuminates the sharp planes of his face. It occurs to Stiles for the first time that Peter Hale, whose nightmares must taste of ashes, just walked into a burning building.

The holding cells then.

Stiles turns away from the counter, away from the weakly moving legs, because that’s what you do in emergencies, right? You _prioritize_. You don’t think about that unknown colleague of yours who’s in imminent danger of burning to death, not when you safely can’t get him. Not when you’re secretly glad you can’t, because you dad is still somewhere in the building, and you need to get to him. And that’s the priority, and not just because he’s your dad, but because he’s the sheriff, and he needs to be in charge, because fuck knows you’ve got no idea what you’re doing, and Ramirez was wrong. He got shot in the gut, what the hell would he know? Dad can’t be—can’t be—

The roar that echoes through the station at that moment is loud enough to jar Stiles’s brain right back on track.

_Scott?_

Peter races toward the sound, toward the cells.

Stiles heads after him.

“Deputy!” Allison yells at him. “Wait! Oh god, wait!”

Stiles stops, turns back, and sees that she’s crouching over a uniform clad figure fallen backward through an open office door. The water from the sprinklers is dripping down her hair. Her shirt’s soaked.

“Are you okay?” Allison asks the deputy on the floor. “Are you—”

The question is cut off as she’s sudden dragged forward into the office.

This is what an ambush looks like.

A very ill-planned ambush.

Stiles steps into the doorway, his Glock leading the way.

Of course it’s Matt. He’s sitting up against a desk. He’s got his fist twisted in Allison’s hair, having pulled her down to the floor beside him.

“Did you walk in here in your uniform?” Stiles asks him. “Did you help set the bomb?”

Matt grimaces, and jabs his firearm against Allison’s temple. He’s clearly hurt. There’s blood spreading in a thick, dark patch over his tan uniform shirt. Good. Stiles hopes it’s bad, and he hopes it hurts like hell.

“What?” Matt asks, water sliding down his face. The hand holding his firearm is shaking. Blood loss, probably. “You don’t want to know the how, Stiles. You never want to know the how. It’s all about the why for you, isn’t it, in your tricky little spastic brain.”

“Did you shoot the people who had your back since the first day you walked into the station?” Stiles doesn’t think he can get a clear shot. He catches Allison’s gaze.

“Oh, fuck you,” Matt wrenches Allison’s head sideways. And forces an arm behind her back. “Can we skip the lecture on fucking morality?”

“Yep,” Stiles says.

Allison tears free from Matt, leaving him holding a handful of her hair. She stabs him in the thigh with an arrow, and he screams in pain and jerks back.

And Stiles shoots him in the face.

 

***

 

The cells.

Kate Argent is standing there, no trace of a smirk on her face as she points her gun at Peter.

Peter is prowling back and forth in the entryway, like he doesn’t even care that she’s about to pump him full of wolfsbane bullets.

“Shoot him!” Gerard Argent tells her.

But he’s in no position to give any orders.

He’s still in his cell, and he’s not alone.

“Dad!” Stiles exclaims.

John’s sitting on the floor of the cell. Scott’s kneeling beside him, his hands pressed over a wound in John’s thigh. Chris Argent is standing over them, and he’s armed, but his gun is trained on Gerard.

“Shoot him!” Gerard calls out. “Shoot him, Katie!”

“Shoot anyone, and I’ll kill you next,” Chris says.

Gerard makes a sound not unlike a growl. “Christopher. Have you forgotten whose side you’re on?”

“I haven’t forgotten,” Chris says. “I follow the code.”

Stiles doesn’t know who to aim for. Doesn’t know what to _do_. The decision is taken from him when Peter charges right at Kate Argent.

She’s very fast. She somehow manages to spin and duck under him, and come out the other side firing. Stiles shoves Allison to the ground, and follows her down. Peter roars.

There’s suddenly a heavy weight on Stiles’s back, his Glock goes spinning from his grasp, and Kate’s got her hands in his hair and she’s wrenching his head back.

“If anyone moves, cutie pie dies first.” There’s a roughness to her voice that Stiles hasn’t heard before, like maybe things are even too fucking crazy for her right now. Like maybe she’s not laughing at the chaos for once. Just maybe she’s drowning in it like everyone else. “And you wouldn’t like that, would you, sweetie?”

Stiles stares at the entryway to the cells.

Derek’s here again. Of course he is.

“Let him go, Kate,” he says.

“No,” Kate says. “Look at you, you dirty fucking mutt! You slip your leash for a few days, and all our good work’s undone. You know what you are, Derek? You’re bad. You’re a _bad_ dog.”

Derek flinches at the words. “Please, Kate, let him go. Let him go and I’ll—”

“You’ll what?” Kate demands. “You’ll crawl and beg and say you’re sorry?”

“Yes.”

Peter growls.

“You’re filth,” Kate tells him. “You’re not worth spitting on. Dirty fucking _animal_. You want your little bitch back? You want him, huh?”

Derek lifts his chin. “Yes.”

“Sweetie, I’ll put so many holes in him you won’t know which one to fuck first.”

Stiles’s breath catches as Derek transforms.

His claws grow in seconds. He throws his head back and growls as his fangs appear. His eyes flash brilliant blue, and his brow thickens to something primitive, something animalistic. Dark hair sprouts along the protruding planes of his face.

He is _magnificent_.

And he’s fast.

Stiles hears the blast of gunfire so close to his ear that it kills all other sounds. He can only hear a high pitching whine as Derek roars and launches himself at Kate. Did she hit him? His body is frozen in shock. He waits there, on his hands and knees on the wet floor, for pain that doesn’t come. He waits to feel a burning rush of it, but he’s numb.

The only thing he feels is a sudden hot spray against his face.

He tastes blood.

It takes him a very long time to realize it’s not his.

It’s Kate’s.

Derek’s ripped her throat out and left her staring glassy-eyed at the ceiling.

Water patters against her face, her skin, and against the spongy red mess where her trachea used to be.

Stiles blinks at her in shock.

And then he starts shivering and can’t stop. Panic claws at him, and he can’t breathe, and he can’t _hear_ , and the only thing he’s aware of as he’s sucked down under the weight of all the panic he’s been suppressing for too long now, is one hand on his chest, one on his back, keeping his core straight so he doesn’t choke.

Derek’s got him. Derek’s making sure he can breathe.

Just like always.


	15. Chapter 15

In the aftermath, Scott takes charge of the scene. He’s not affected by the smoke and, unlike the guys who were off duty or the deputies who’ve come from Blue Lake Valley, he actually knows what’s going on. He transfers Gerard Argent, who crumpled like an empty fucking sheet once he realized Kate was dead and he wasn’t going anywhere, into the custody of a pair of deputies from the Valley, and they lock him in the back of their cruiser.

Scott also makes sure that Derek and Peter are nowhere around. Stiles figures one of them is driving the Jeep home. The guy who was in a coma for ten years, or the one who probably didn’t even have his learner’s permit before Kate abducted him? It’s lucky Stiles has insurance.

And what sort of asshole is Stiles that he’s even thinking about his Jeep right now? When the street is now crowded with onlookers pressing up against the edges of the cordon, hoping to get a look at the devastation. Some of them had family inside the station. Stiles keeps his eyes fixed on the ground so he doesn’t have to see them, doesn’t have to meet their gazes and confirm what they already suspect.

O’Shea and her team are working on getting the fire out now, pumping water on the still-smoldering façade of the station.

Stiles sits in the gutter with a shiny crinkly tinfoil blanket tucked around his shoulders, and an oxygen mask strapped to his face. He doesn’t want to go to the hospital. Not yet. There’s some part of him that wants to sit here until it’s over. Until every last body has been brought out of the station. He owes them that much, right?

His dad is as bad as he is. He took a bullet to the thigh, and he’s pretty high on morphine right now, and he keeps insisting that he’s the sheriff and he’s in charge, dammit, and those are his people in there. He looks about a single heartbeat away from total fucking breakdown actually. Sheriff Bowman from the Valley pretty much has to threaten him with violence to get him into the back of an ambulance.

“Those are my _people_ , Larry!” John yells at him. “You hear me?”

Stiles wrenches the mask off. “Get in the fucking ambulance, Dad!”

Then he has a coughing fit.

“You too, Stiles,” Larry Bowman says, helping him to his feet and putting him in the same ambulance as John.

Stiles tries not get in the way while the paramedic gets his dad comfortable. John isn’t having a bar of that. He holds onto Stiles’s wrist to keep him close. Curls his other hand around the back of Stiles’s neck. They both stink of smoke.

John’s gaze falls on the pinkish stain on the front of Stiles’s wet shirt.

Stiles doesn’t know if it’s Kate’s or Matt’s blood.

“I shot Matt,” he blurts out suddenly. “Shot him in the face.”

The paramedic working on John’s thigh freezes for a second.

John tightens his grip on Stiles’s wrist. “You don’t tell that to anyone else without a union rep beside you, okay, kid?”

“Y-yeah.”

“You did good,” John tells him, wincing a little as the paramedic shifts his leg. “You did good, son.”

The ride to the hospital is over quickly. John’s wheeled inside. Stiles heads in after him, and is turned back when John is taken into surgery.

“He’ll be fine,” Melissa McCall tells him firmly. “We’ll take good care of him, Stiles.”

“Yeah.” Stiles doesn’t even know where he finds the shaky smile he flashes her. “He’s still complaining, so…”

Melissa squeezes his shoulder.

“How’s Ramirez?”

“Still in surgery.”

Stiles catches the worry in her gaze. “Scott’s fine,” he assures her. “Not a scratch on him.”

Melissa closes her eyes briefly, and goes still. A moment later she draws a deep breath, opens her eyes again, and nods at him. “You wait here, Stiles. I’m gonna find someone to get you a bed.”

Stiles doesn’t want a bed. He also knows better than to argue. He sits down again, leaning over slightly so that it’s easier to breathe. He shivers in the air conditioning. His tinfoil blanket isn’t doing a lot against the cold now. He kind of wants to strip off his shirt and his jeans, but he also doesn’t want to make more of a spectacle for the ordinary folk waiting with their migraines and their shortness of breath and their…wow, has that guy nailed his hand to a board? Seems like something Stiles would do, actually.

Stiles looks up again at the doors to the waiting room roll open.

Chris and Allison Argent.

“Smoke inhalation corner over here,” Stiles croaks, and waves them over. He waits until they sit down beside him, then lowers his voice. “Didn’t expect to see you here, honestly.”

“Deputy McCall made us come,” Allison tells him, and her slight smile can’t just be down to shock and those crazy Argent genes, right? There’s something there, maybe, a softening of her expression when she says Scott’s name. She’s an Argent, from a long line of hunters, and she saw Scott wolfed out tonight, and she might actually be okay with that?

Chris’s narrow look suggests he’ll need a little more convincing.

Stiles clears his sore throat. “My best bet is the FBI will be here in an hour, tops. Any reason why I shouldn’t point them in your direction?”

“You won’t have to,” Chris Argent says shrewdly. “I’m sure I’m already at the top of their list.”

“Point taken,” Stiles admits, and then coughs again. “But I can make sure they know what happened in there.”

He can still hear Gerard’s sneering voice: _“Christopher. Have you forgotten whose side you’re on?”_

Chris’s eyes crinkle at the edges when he flashes Stiles a rueful smile. “”You gonna tell them what happened in there? Really?”

It’s another fair point.

Stiles tugs his tinfoil blanket tighter around his shoulders. “Well, maybe you tell me exactly what happened, and we can decide together what they need to know.”

“Got a call from his lawyer saying he wanted me to post bail,” Chris says. “I know now it wasn’t his lawyer. It was Daehler, probably. So I went down to the station.”

“Really?” Stiles asks. “You went to post bail for him, knowing what he’d done to Derek Hale?”

“No. I went down to the station hoping I’d get the chance to talk to him, and ask if any of it was true. About Kate. About Derek, and the fire.”

Stiles huffs out a breath. “Guess you found out, right?”

“Guess I did,” Chris replies. “It was your father’s idea to hole up in Gerard’s cell. Gave us some leverage. Smart.”

“Genetic, too,” Stiles tells him, and leans back again to ease the tightness in his chest. “So. Were they trying to recruit you, or trying to kill you?”

“Hell if I know,” Chris mutters.

“Well, either way they fucked it up,” Stiles offers.

Chris’s mouth quirks in the faintest shadow of a smile.

It’s probably no consolation at all, really.

 

***

 

Parrish is brought in to the hospital just as Stiles has been checked over and is leaving. He’s on a stretcher. He’s naked, apart a tinfoil blanket like Stiles's, and huge smears and swathes of black ash.

“I’m fine!” he tries to insist. “The counter must’ve shielded me.”

Stiles remembers the legs twitching behind the counter. The flames encroaching. The fact that he’d known he was leaving a guy to die.

“Jordan!” he exclaims.

“Stiles. Is the sheriff okay?”

“In surgery. He’s gonna be fine.”

“I don’t remember anything much after the bomb went off,” Parrish says. “How the hell did I get my clothes burned off but not my skin?”

Not actually the craziest thing Stiles has heard lately.

“I dunno, man. I’m just glad you’re okay.”

“Yeah.” Parrish frowns and shakes his head. “You too, Stiles. You too.”

That's right when Melissa comes to tell Stiles that John's out of surgery, and all thoughts of going home vanish.

 

***

 

“Hey, Dad,” Stiles whispers as John blinks his eye open.

“You’re a nurse now?” John asks him, squinting.

“Melissa loaned me her spare scrubs,” Stiles tells him. “How’s your leg?”

“Come here, kid,” John tells him.

Stiles doesn’t care that he’s an adult. He climbs up beside his dad, a little squashed against the rails of the bed, and thinks about the last time he did this with one of his parents. The last time, when one of them slipped away in a cold, sterile room that smelled of antiseptic. Stiles closes his eyes again. He could be eight years old again right now, still thinking that if he just holds on hard enough they can’t leave.

“Your mom would be so proud of you, kiddo,” John tells him, voice low and rough. “I know I am.”

“Pretty sure I fucked up everything they taught us at the academy about critical incidents.”

John huffs. “Pretty sure there’s no class in the world that could have prepared you for tonight.”

Stiles rests his head on his dad’s shoulder, and remembers when he was small enough for his dad to carry. Remembers when looking at his dad meant looking up and up and up, and a hug was something Stiles gave around the knees. Is it memory or fantasy? Or is it something Stiles has extrapolated somehow from the stories that his dad tells him, from the home videos he still sometimes catches John watching, from the framed photographs on the living room bookshelf.

Sometimes Stiles thinks he’s spent his whole life wanting to turn the clock back, but nothing has felt as precarious as this night since the death of his mom. Stiles never wants to let his dad go.

“I love you, Stiles,” John says. “But you can’t stay here all night.”

Stiles opens his mouth to protest.

“I’m okay,” John tells him firmly. “But don’t forget we’ve got Derek and Peter to worry about too.”

Stiles feels warmth spread through him at his dad’s words.

Family. Pack.

Nobody’s saying it, but it feels right.

 

***

  

It’s late when Stiles bums a lift off a nurse finishing up her shift and gets home. The house is in darkness, but Derek wrenches the door open before Stiles even steps onto the porch. Behind Derek, in the darkness, red eyes flash.

“Dad’s out of surgery,” he says. “Why are you both lurking here in the dark?”

“We can see in the dark,” Derek says. He draws Stiles close, and nuzzles against his throat.

“Der…” He tries half-heartedly to push Derek away. He must stink of blood and ash and smoke still. “I need a shower.”

He treads upstairs, flicking on lights as he goes. He stands for a long time under the hot spray of the shower. The water runs clear, and then it runs cold, and Stiles is shivering again by the time he can get his limbs to move.

He tugs on his sleep pants and his Stud Muffin shirt, and stumbles into Derek’s bedroom. He crawls under the quilt, still shaking. He has no idea now if it’s from the cold, or from shock, or from low blood sugar, or if this is an adrenaline dump. He only knows he’s shivering and he can’t stop it any more than he can stop his brain from replaying in Technicolor flashes every moment at the station tonight.

It’s not long until Derek joins him.

“Okay?” Derek whispers.

“Only w-when I’m the little sp-spoon.”

Derek’s so warm behind him. His splays one hand over Stiles’s chest, and one over his abdomen, and Stiles can feel the heat of them through his thin shirt. Derek’s thighs press up behind Stiles’s, encouraging him to draw his legs up a little, to curl in on himself if he needs.

“Y-you okay?”

Derek doesn’t answer.

Stiles slowly relaxes into Derek’s warmth. The shivers subside, and become irregular tremors. Tiny aftershocks that chase through him less and less frequently. Derek’s breath tickles the back of his ear, and Stiles turns his head a little into the pillow and breathes in Derek’s scent.

Then he moves, rolling over in Derek’s embrace. Derek’s hand settles on his hip. Their faces are close together, and how unfair is it that Stiles is as good as blind, but wolves can see in the dark?

Jesus. He and Scott _really_ need to start writing shit down.

Stiles hears the quiet tread of footsteps in the hallway, and then the faint squeak of his dad’s door opening. “What's Peter doing?”

“You dad’s scent makes him feel safer,” Derek murmurs.

“Oh.” Stiles isn’t sure if that’s creepy of not. Except didn’t he just turn his head into Derek’s pillow and do the same thing? He thinks of Kate Argent, and the way she viciously suppressed Derek’s wolf. She took most of his human side down along with it too, Stiles thinks. Because the things wolves and humans need aren’t that different: they need food, and shelter, and warmth. They need comfort.

“Are you really okay?” he asks Derek again.

Not quite silence this time. “I don’t know.”

“You loved her for a long time. It doesn’t matter if she manipulated you into that. What you felt was still real.” Stiles lifts his hand and places it against Derek’s cheek. Runs his thumb along the sharp angle of that jaw. “You’re allowed to feel sorry she’s dead.”

Derek’s cheek is damp.

“But I’m glad I saw your wolf today,” Stiles whispers. “It was amazing.”

 _Amazing_ , he says, but he thinks _beautiful_.

“Shouldn’t have,” Derek whispers back, his voice straining. “Shouldn’t have let it out.”

“Hey. Don’t though, okay?” Stiles’s eyes sting. “Your wolf saved us all.”

Derek is silent again.

“Der, am I your bitch? Am I just a hole for your wolf?”

“ _No!_ ” Derek exclaims.

Stiles presses his fingers gently over Derek’s mouth. “Okay, so if you don’t believe those things she said about me, why do you believe the things she said about you?”

Derek opens his mouth and closes it again.

That’s okay.

There aren’t any quick solutions here. Stiles knows this is a long road. He’s not going to exorcise the ghost of Kate Argent with some middle-of-the-night cuddling and a few trite logical deductions. But just because it’s a long road doesn’t mean Stiles isn’t going to walk it with Derek.

The quilt they’re lying under was made by his mom. Stiles can remember tiptoeing through the intricate stacks of fabric she'd set out on the floor when she first starting making it. At first Stiles had been interested in the quilt. He’d helped his mom pick the design, and the fabric. But then it got really boring. His mom kept working on the quilt for weeks, and then for months, and didn’t she know you could just go to Walmart and buy blankets there? But his mom kept at it, and months later she was finally done.

“Well,” she said, throwing the quilt over the bed. “It’s done!”

And then she’d started laughing so hard at all the crooked stitches and wonky borders that Stiles had started laughing too, and then she’d held his hands while he’d jumped gleefully on the bed and the new quilt.

In the end, it’s the imperfections that are the most beautiful.

“We’re gonna be okay, Der,” Stiles whispers to him in the dark. “That’s a thing that’s going to happen. You know how I know?”

“How?”

Stiles smiles slightly. “Because every other impossible thing has already happened. Must be our turn next.”

He dozes off in the warmth of Derek’s embrace.


	16. Chapter 16

Stiles is tired the next day, still in shock probably, and if he gets a little confused about the sequence of events, what does it matter? The union rep sitting beside him and the FBI agent sitting across from him clearly aren’t too bothered by his tiny lapses, or they way he sometimes has to ask for clarification on things he’s already said. Stiles might be hiding some things, but—despite the elastic relationship he’s always had with ethics, truth and justice being relative and all that—he knows he didn’t do anything wrong. He shot Matt when Matt had a gun in Allison Argent’s face. Anything else, including how much Stiles actually wanted the asshole dead, is actually irrelevant.

And Kate…

Kate’s body was apparently found in the fire near the front counter of the station. Stiles doesn’t know who dumped it there. He thinks it was maybe Peter, hiding evidence of the way she was really killed. Or maybe it was Chris, if he could have brought himself to do it. It doesn’t really matter. Stiles tells the FBI agent that he doesn’t know what happened to Kate. There was a struggle, and he hit the floor, and then he doesn’t remember.

The FBI agent asks about the man who helped him to the paramedics.

Stiles says he doesn’t know. Maybe someone who got through the cordon Captain O’Shea set up? There was a lot of confusion. A lot.

Besides, nobody here is going to ask him too many hard questions about non-lethal options of choice when it comes to Matt Daehler. Particularly not when Matt walked inside the station and shot the people he once worked alongside. Stiles is reasonably sure that nothing he says will be contradicted by anyone else. Even Gerard, that crazy old fuck, is hardly going to start ranting about werewolves, is he? Not unless he wants to spend his remaining years doped up to the eyeballs on antipsychotic meds, hugging himself in his straightjacket.

Still, the interview takes almost two hours, and Stiles is wrung out by the end. He needs some coffee, and some Adderall, and another few hours sleep wouldn’t go astray either.

When the FBI agent shakes his hand at the end and asks how his dad’s doing, Stiles figures he’s in the clear.

He steps outside the office in the Town Hall—the FBI is running their show out of the basement there, while a makeshift police station has been set up on the ground floor. The survivors, along with those deputies who were lucky enough not to be working when it happened, are dealing with the influx of media, the fallout from the loss of six of their colleagues, and all the while trying to still do their jobs and patrol the goddamn town. Some of the guys from Blue Lake Valley are taking shifts in Beacon Hills too, and the local Neighborhood Watch has organized its own visible citizens patrols until the department is back on its feet. It’s going to be a lot of hard work getting things back to normal. Parrish and Scott have been working around the clock.

John refuses to stay in hospital any longer than a day, so when Stiles is done with the FBI he drives over to collect him. He knows his dad needs to be on the frontline. Needs to get the temporary station up and running. Needs to make sure the actual station gets repaired as soon as possible. Or rebuilt. There’s been some talk of structural damage due to the bomb. John also needs to reach out to the families of those deputies who didn’t make it home. There are funerals to arrange. Accounts to be set up for the donations already flooding in for their kids. In fifteen years time little Amy Foster, who only just beat leukemia, will get a free ride to college because her dad was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s not a fair exchange, but people need to do something, and what else is there to do?

Nobody knows yet if Ramirez is going to make it or not. Stiles can still see the smear of his blood down the walls when he closes his eyes.

Stiles sits in his Jeep in the parking lot of the hospital for what feels like a long time before he can make himself go inside.

John is already waiting, sitting in a wheelchair with a pair of metal crutches resting across his knees. A doctor is telling him that he really should stay in for at least a few more days, and John’s steadfastly refusing.

The doctor eventually lets them leave with a few pages of post-surgery instructions, a bottle of pain meds, spare dressings, and an appointment for a check up in two days.

It takes a while to get John into the Jeep.

“How’d the interview go?” John asks when he’s finally seated.

“Okay, I think,” Stiles says, putting the Jeep into gear. “Long, though.”

“I need to get my phone charged up,” John says with a grunt. “Hate to think how many calls I’m missing.”

“Not until tomorrow,” Stiles tells him firmly. “Larry Bowman’s loaned us some guys from the Valley, we’re setting up a temporary station in Town Hall, the mayor’s office is fielding all the press inquiries, and Shauna has been talking to the families.”

Shauna has been John’s civilian administration assistant for the past five years. There’s nothing she can’t do.

“Stiles—”

“You got shot, Dad,” Stiles reminds him. “You’re allowed to take a day off. Tomorrow I’ll drive you to visit the families myself. But not tonight, okay? Tonight we have stuff to do.”

John looks like he’s going to argue about it, and then he raises his eyebrows as the realization hits. “Full moon.”

“Yeah.” Stiles heads the Jeep for home. His heartbeat stutters. “Full moon.”

 

***

 

Stiles isn’t really sure about this at all.

In the gathering dusk, the remains of the Hale house look like something out of a horror movie. It’s impossible to look at the house without thinking of what happened here. Of who died here.

The overgrown clearing in front of the house must have been a garden once. Derek just stands there and stares. His fingers clench and unclench into fists. His face is expressionless, the tight line of his mouth trembling a little. Every so often he appears to shudder, as though he’s constantly being buffeted by some invisible storm. Stiles wants to lead him back into the Jeep and take him away from here, but he knows it won’t make a difference. A part of Derek is always here, always staring at the devastation. He might not have seen the house until tonight, but Stiles knows he’s thought of it. Every fucking day for the past ten years probably, while Kate gloated about it and used his grief and his guilt to break him down. He’s carried the burden of the fire since the night it happened, but he’s never been allowed to truly mourn his family.

Peter is standing closer to the house, his head on an angle as he studies it intently. He reminds Stiles of someone looking at one of those Magic Eye pictures. Looking and looking at the thing that’s been presented on the page, and waiting for the secret image to reveal itself. Maybe he’s waiting for the ruins to crumble and reveal the house, pristine, still standing behind them. Maybe he’s waiting to hear the ghosts of his family laugh instead of scream.

John is leaning on the hood of the Jeep, watching Peter watch the house.

Scott’s nervous. He keeps turning to look at the fat, full moon as it rises. His eyes flash gold every time. He’s shifting his weight from foot to foot, and chewing on his bottom lip anxiously. Alan Deaton is standing beside him.

Stiles edges closer so he can hear what Deaton is saying.

“An anchor keeps you tethered to your humanity,” Deaton says. “It makes certain you don’t lose yourself entirely to the wolf.”

“What is it though?” Scott makes his confused face. It’s the one he perfected in high school chemistry.

“An anchor can be many things,” Deaton says. “A memory, a mantra, a person, a prayer.” He glances at Peter. “Perhaps even a voice. It’s whatever you use to keep yourself from becoming lost.”

“What if I don’t have one?” Scott asks, his voice pitched higher with worry. “What if I shift, and I can’t find one?”

“You will,” Deaton tells him calmly. “You have Stiles and the Sheriff. You have your alpha, and your pack mate. You have your mother. You even have Kylo.”

Stiles snorts.

Deaton smiles slightly. “You have a million reasons to hold onto your humanity, Scott, and to return to your human life. You’re going to do fine. When you shift, your instincts will tell you to listen to your alpha. And Peter will steer you home safely.”

Scott looks dubious.

It has to be complicated, right? Scott never asked for the bite from a crazy homicidal alpha. And Peter didn’t know what the hell he was doing when he bit him. It’s not the best way to build a relationship.

Peter looks back at them suddenly. “The bite is a gift,” he says.

Scott shifts from foot to foot again.

“That’s what my father always used to say,” Peter muses. “The bite is a gift. I’m sorry though. A gift should never be forced. I would offer to take it back if I could.”

“It’s not your fault,” Scott says, taking a deep breath. He shrugs. “Yesterday I was the only one who didn’t have to get treated for smoke inhalation. Me, the kid who only grew out of my asthma a few years ago. That was kind of amazing.”

Peter doesn’t smile. He looks almost grateful, like he’d expected Scott to hate him.

Please. Like Scott could ever hold a grudge. This one time in third grade Jackson broke Scott’s Transformer that he’d only had for a week, and never even apologized, and three days later they were eating lunch together. Scott is a ball of fucking sunshine. It’s why he and Stiles work so well together. Stiles brings the much needed cynicism, sarcasm, and revenge fantasies to the table that is their friendship.

Stiles moves closer to Scott and Deaton. “Can I ask a question?”

“Of course,” Deaton says.

“What’s Derek’s anchor?” Stiles asks him.

Deaton’s answering smile is a little sad. “I don’t know. I suspect it’s changed since he was a boy and I really knew him last. I suspect it’s guilt.”

“Oh.” Stiles swallows down his sudden rush of disappointment.

“Go and wait with Peter, Scott,” Deaton says. “Go on, you’ll be fine.”

Scott moves toward the house.

“You thought you were his anchor,” Deaton murmurs under his breath.

Stiles watches Derek’s fists clench and unclench, clench and unclench. “Yeah.” He shakes his head. “Just, he never stood up to her for himself, but…”

_But he always did for me._

He can’t finish the thought.

“An anchor is something a wolf creates for himself,” Deaton tells him. “He builds it, and hones it. It takes time, and it takes will. From what I know, Derek was acting purely on instinct when he protected you. You’re not his anchor, Stiles. I think you’re his mate.”

Stiles jerks a little in surprise. “His what?”

“His wolf recognized you from the start,” Deaton says placidly. “It fought all his efforts to suppress it, in order to protect you. It was losing the fight against Kate Argent until you arrived. You’re much more than an anchor.”

“I, um… I have no idea what to do with that information.”

Deaton smiles at him. “You don’t need to do anything with it. It doesn’t change anything. Derek needs time to heal. He needs his pack. You and I can revisit this conversation in the future.”

“Right,” Stiles breathes. “Okay then.”

“But I’m sure when you give yourself some time to reflect, you’ll realize this isn’t a surprise.”

Stiles thinks of the way he can only sleep without nightmares when Derek’s beside him. He thinks of the way they sometimes lie awake at night, holdings hands and touching, and how it makes him feel so warm, so safe. He thinks of the way Derek unfurls a little whenever Stiles is near him, like a tiny blade of grass reaching for the sunlight. And how he thinks he does the same thing.

“No,” he agrees, warmth expanding inside him. “It’s not a surprise.”

 

***

 

When the full moon rises and washes the clearing with silver light, Peter tilts his head back, flashes his red eyes at the moon, and transforms.

“Holy shit,” John says softly, and Peter turns toward him.

He’s not the monstrous alpha he was when he was mad. Stiles can still see the man behind the wolf’s face. Peter sniffs the air, and growls, and stalks toward the Jeep where John is leaning. He stops in front of John, and lifts his chin as though he’s sniffing again. Then he reaches out a clawed hand and spreads his fingers on John’s leg, just above his knee.

Black lines crawl up his forearm, like ink running in his veins as he takes John's pain.

John holds Peter’s gaze the entire time.

 

***

 

Derek is the last one of the wolves to shift. He paces back and forth in front of the house restlessly like a caged animal, his back turned on the moon as though he can somehow ignore it. His expression veers between a scowl and something that might be sheer panic. Stiles wants to walk over to him, to help him somehow, but he knows it’s not his place. He knows, right now, that he isn’t what Derek needs.

Peter crosses the clearing to Derek instead. Encircles his nephew’s wrist with one clawed hand, and brings his other hand up to the back of Derek’s neck. Forces him to meet his gaze. Peter growls, his eyes flashing alpha red. Derek makes a rumbling sound in his chest in return, and then he’s shifting. He growls at Peter and shows his fangs. Peter tugs on his hair and roars.

It’s… not as aggressive as it seems, maybe? Despite the growls and the flashes of teeth. Is it possibly the equivalent of pups play fighting? It’s kind of hard to tell. Stiles is terrified he’s about to watch one of the Hales get disemboweled, but Deaton doesn’t look too worried. Neither does Scott, who’s encroaching on Derek and Peter almost hopefully. Peter reaches out and grabs him, pulling him into the weird wolfy roughhousing.

Stiles needs to start researching wolf behavior.

“Hell of a thing,” John says quietly.

Stiles nods. It’s not often that he’s lost for words, but yeah, he’s got nothing.

Derek detaches himself from the growly knot, and jogs over toward Stiles. He looks shy? Can werewolves with Neanderthal facial ridges and excessive facial hair even look shy? Because he that’s what it kind of looks like he’s doing. And then Stiles realizes, no, Derek’s not shy. Not with the way he’s keeping his chin on his chest like that. Not with the way he keeps his gaze downturned, or the way he’s hunching his shoulders up like he’s trying to disappear into the space between them. He’s not shy. He’s _ashamed_.

Okay, so Stiles knows what to do here.

He steps forward to meet his wolf, boots crunching in the leaf litter. Derek looks up warily.

“Hey,” he says. “Hey, Derek.”

“Stiles,” the wolf says, the name distorted a little through his fangs.

Stiles reaches up and puts a hand on his cheek. Traces the sharper angles of his face. Smooths the coarse hair on his jaw. Runs his thumb over the points of his fangs.

“You are so incredible,” he whispers, staring into Derek’s brilliant blue eyes. “You’re amazing.”

Derek inhales deeply, and gives a pleased rumble when Stiles tilts his jaw to let him nuzzle against his throat. Stiles gives him a moment to scent his fill, then pushes him back gently. Derek’s brow scrunches in confusion before Stiles presses himself against him and kisses him gently. Derek’s fangs snag against his lips.

It’s weird.

It’s especially weird he did it with his dad watching. It’s also sort of impossible to care about that, because he’s an adult, and he’s allowed to kiss other adults, even if they are werewolves. His dad always told him not to hook up with married people—however much they swore their divorce would be finalized any day now—boys with motorcycles, or anyone who wasn’t willing to let him meet their parents. He never said anything about werewolves. Which was a terrible oversight, because they’re probably a lot more dangerous than motorcycles.

Stiles breaks the kiss, and cards his fingers in Derek’s hair. Derek’s cheeks are damp, his skin shining in the moonlight.

“You don’t talk much and that’s okay,” Stiles says, stepping up onto his toes so he can bump their foreheads together. “Because I do enough talking for both of us. But I do want to tell you something important right now, okay?”

Derek nods.

“I’m here for you,” Stiles tells him. “For as long as you need, I’m here. But, fair warning, Der, I expect the same from you.”

Derek’s fangs gleam when he smiles. He holds onto Stiles like he’s never going to let him go.

And Stiles is completely on board with that.

 


	17. Chapter 17

_Eight months later_

 

“One, two, _three_ ,” Stiles says.

Okay, so Scott doesn’t _always_ go for scissors first, but it’s still the safest bet.

“Aw, crap,” Scott mutters, staring accusingly at his scissor fingers.

Stiles waves his rock-fist triumphantly in his face. “Oh, yes! Praise Jeebus! Sucks to be you, Scotty, sucks to be you!”

He grins and shoves Scott into the bathroom.

Gruffy the Safety Dog is a Beacon Hills institution. There isn’t a kid in Beacon Hills who doesn’t remember the day that Gruffy visited their class, because there were stickers and balloons and candy. Which… shouldn’t the point of the day be to teach the kids _not_ to accept gifts from weird strangers? But hey, at least this time Stiles won’t be stuck in the suit. It’s hot, and heavy, and it smells of mothballs.

Instead, Stiles gets to be Gruffy’s friend, and do all the talking. He’s the one who tells the kids how to cross the road safely, and what number to call in an emergency, and how it’s important that if anything ever happens that makes you feel uncomfortable, you have to find an adult that you trust and tell them.

It’s hard work staying attentive and engaging for a bunch of little kids with the combined attention span of a single goldfish, but it’s better than sweating to death in the Gruffy suit.

Stiles knocks on the bathroom door. “How’s it going in there, Scotty?”

“Shut up.”

Stiles laughs.

“Do I have to wear the head?” Scott whines.

“Yes!”

“I hate the head! It’s gonna mess with my hair. I have a date with Allison tonight, and I’m going to have Gruffy hair!”

Stiles rolls his eyes. Scott and Allison have been dating for two months now. Frankly, if Allison can deal with the fact Scott's a werewolf who also owns an evil cat and at least one Nickelback CD, Stiles doesn’t think she’s going to care much about his hair.

Still, they make a ridiculously cute couple. And props to Scott for manning up enough to ask Allison out in the first place. Okay, so technically she asked him out, but props to Scott for manning up and saying yes even though she comes from a long line of werewolf hunters and has the scariest hot dad in the world.

Stiles actually does trust that Chris and Allison are good people. They’ve proved that. But he’s not going to invite them around for a friendly barbecue anytime soon. They might be good people, but Derek and Peter don’t need to have them shoved in their faces, right? There’s too much baggage on both sides for that, and Stiles is Team Hale all the way.

Stiles takes his phone out of his pocket and checks for messages. There’s one from his dad reminding him to pick up bread on the way home. And there’s one from Derek: a photograph of a row of saplings.

Derek’s been working at the local nursery for the last three months. It’s perfect for him, actually. He gets to work outside, and he doesn’t have to talk to people, and he’s actually really good at getting stuff to grow. Stiles thinks it’s because he’s so patient. He shakes his head at Stiles because Stiles’s idea of gardening is digging a hole, putting a plant in it, watering it once and then forgetting about it until it dies.

The garden is looking much better since Derek moved in. They even have a vegetable patch now. Well, it's more than a patch. It takes up most of the back yard, and it has things growing in it that Stiles can't even identify. Some of the neighbors have actually started stopping by to ask Derek questions about what he’s planting, and to compliment him on his work. Stiles suspects they’re also trying to figure out exactly where Derek and Peter fit in with the Stilinskis, and, well, if they do figure it out, Stiles hopes they share the information.

It’s been weird. Obviously Derek has moved in with them. They share Stiles’s room now. Peter has moved from the basement into the guest room. And yes, it’s weird that Stiles got a boyfriend and a boyfriend’s uncle in some sort of strange two-for-one deal, but it’s weirder because he knows Peter’s not just there for Derek.

Scott keeps asking him if he and Derek are going to get their own place, and Stiles keeps putting off the question, because if he and Derek moved out and Peter stayed—and Stiles is pretty damn sure that’s how it would work out—then suddenly the whole John-is-Peter’s-anchor thing would be something everyone couldn’t pretend to ignore anymore.

Because Peter is terrifying, okay? He’s clever and ruthless, and he’s already got the reputation in the supernatural community as an alpha you do not want to fuck with. Last month he fought off four rogue omegas on his own. By the time Derek and Stiles got him home he was covered in blood and almost feral with rage.

And John had put a hand on his shoulder, and looked into his red eyes, and just said, “Peter. Settle down.”

Three steady words and Peter was human again.

It was one of the most awesome things Stiles has ever seen. And also one of the most uncomfortable. Stiles feels like he should take Gruffy’s advice and find an adult to tell. Because watching that sort of intimacy between his dad and another guy… that level of trust and, okay, yes, _love_ , had really shocked Stiles. Not because he thinks whatever is happening between his dad and Peter is necessarily about sex or whatever—brain bleach, please—but because it’s unquestionably about _family_.

Stiles isn’t sure when it happened.

Maybe the first time John Stilinski walked into Peter Hale’s hospital room and started a one-sided conversation with a coma patient. The first time that Peter latched on to John’s voice and used it to find his way back home.

It’s strange to think of his dad as someone’s everything. To realize he can be the most important person in somebody else’s life too, when for so long he’s belonged only to Stiles in that way. The shift in his worldview isn’t as sudden as the one that happened on the day when Stiles realized werewolves were a thing, but it’s no less momentous.

Of course, if there’s one thing the last eight months have taught Stiles it’s how to roll with the punches. It’s not just him and his dad anymore. They have a pack now. That’s kind of awesome.

“Come on, Scotty!” He raps on the bathroom door. “There’s thirty kids under the age of seven waiting to smother Deputy Gruffy in hugs!”

And undoubtedly kick him accidentally—and repeatedly—in the balls.

It’s going to be the best day ever.

For Stiles, at least.

 

***

 

Thank god for werewolf healing. Scott’s more or less in one piece when they finally get back to the station. Scott puts the Gruffy costume back in the in the locker room closet, and kicks it in the head for good measure.

“If you break him, I’ll tell Dad and it’ll come out of your pay,” Stiles threatens.

Scott ignores him and fusses over his hair, which really is doing strange things.  

“Have a good date with Allison, bro,” Stiles says.

Scott gives him a dopey grin. “I will!”

Stiles heads upstairs. The new station only opened last month. Everything is all very clean and shiny. He jingles the keys of the Jeep from his finger and sticks his head into the bullpen to say goodbye to Ramirez and Parrish, then heads for the back door.

Stiles loves his job but these days he loves going home more.

 

***

 

Derek’s dirt-encrusted work boots are sitting by the front door when Stiles arrives home. Stiles nudges them with the toe of his shoe and grins at them stupidly before he unlocks the door and lets himself in.

He finds Derek in the living room, watching TV with his sock-clad feet on the table.

Stiles waves at him not to get up, and instead flops down beside him on the couch. It doesn’t take long until he’s stuck to Derek’s side like a limpet, head resting on Derek’s shoulder, and Derek’s arm around him. Stiles toes his shoes off and wiggles his feet against Derek’s.

Derek turns his head and presses a soft kiss to Stiles’s forehead.

Stiles inhales deeply. Derek smells faintly of sweat and loam.

It’s been eight months, and they’re taking things slow. At first Stiles had secretly worried that he wouldn’t be able to handle it. He’s not exactly the poster child for patience, okay? But he and Derek kiss and cuddle, and Stiles gets to be the little spoon every night, and if things get a little too heated Stiles grabs some quick alone time in the bathroom. Except for last night, when Derek had hooked his chin over Stiles’s shoulder in bed and watched him take care of himself. And holy crap, it was possibly the hottest thing Stiles has ever done in his life. Afterward Derek had kissed him and held him until he fell asleep.

They’re getting there.

“Did you get to be Deputy Gruffy?” Derek asks him.

Stiles grins and runs his hand down Derek’s chest. “Nah, Scott did.”

“You sound pretty happy about that.”

“It’s disgusting inside that suit. It’s heavy, and it’s hot, and these little kids just want to climb you. And the stink! I can’t even properly describe the stink.” Stiles huffs against Derek’s shoulder. “I don’t think Gruffy’s been dry-cleaned since the late nineties, to be honest.”

Derek catches a twist of Stiles’s hair between his thumb and his forefinger and teases the strands apart. “Please tell me you’re exaggerating.”

“I never exaggerate, Derek.”

Derek raises his eyebrows, but is kind enough not to refute that. He shifts out from underneath Stiles, stands up, and then holds his hand down to pull Stiles to his feet.

“What?”

Derek draws him down toward the kitchen. “I made you soup.”

“Why? Am I sick?”

“Remember how we talked about how my wolf sometimes needs to prove itself to you?” Derek’s voice is pitched a little higher than usual. He’s still nervous talking about stuff like this.

Stiles squeezes his hand. “Seriously? Oh my god, did you make me soup from scratch? Is this homemade soup made from vegetables you grew yourself? Like a freaking _pilgrim_?”

Derek smiles.

“Wow.” Stiles steps into the kitchen and inhales deeply. “Don’t spoil me, Der. I’ll expect you to build me a log cabin next.”

Derek tilts his head, speculative. “I could probably do that.”

“I am not moving anywhere without Wi-Fi,” Stiles warns him.

There’s a pot simmering on the stove. Stiles steps over to it and lifts the lid. The soup smells great. And kind of meaty. “Der, this isn’t vegetarian, is it? I mean the carrots, sure, and the onions, but what’s this stuff here?”

Derek flushes. “Um. It’s rabbit.”

Stiles inhales. “It smells _incredible_. Is this what you and the guys were doing last full moon?” He raises his eyebrows. “Is this why Peter wanted the chest freezer in the basement, because, gotta be honest, I was a bit worried about where that was going.”

Derek takes the lid off him and sets it back down on the pot. “You really think your dad would let Peter build some sort of serial killer lair in the basement?”

“See? You thought serial killer too.” Stiles laughs and reaches out and takes his hand. “You went hunting for me, Der?”

Derek’s flush deepens. “Yes.”

Stiles has watched a lot of National Geographic, okay? He knows there’s something in Derek that’s hardwired to provide for his mate. In most of their relationship, man to man, Derek knows that Stiles earns more money than him, and he knows that Stiles can change his own tires, and that he is perfectly capable of looking after himself, and Derek's fine with all of that. Once the wolf gets involved though, all of those things are suddenly irrelevant. The wolf _needs_ to provide.

Stiles lifts his chin and tilts his head, showing the wolf his exposed throat. “You’re so good to me.”

He puts his free hand on Derek’s chest, to feel his pleased rumble as well as hear it.

Kate Argent spent a decade trying to suppress the wolf, to make Derek ashamed of it. Stiles will do whatever he can to make Derek know that the man, the wolf, they’re the same guy. They’re both Derek, and there’s not a single part of Derek that Stiles doesn’t want in his life.

Also, he makes great soup, so it’s win/win for Stiles.

Stiles lifts his chin and kisses Derek softly. “I’m so glad I found you. I love you.”

Derek’s beautiful eyes shine. “I love you too.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to everyone who joined me on this crazy ride! 
> 
> Thanks to @swlfangirl and @mishacollinsatemysoul for the awesome prompt that started everything! 
> 
> And thanks, as always, to the awesome cheer squad on GR who always make these stories so fun to write. And who told me I should add chickens. 
> 
> And give me a few days, and I’ll have that bonus John/Peter story for you all.


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